RUTHFULLY YOURS

In its subtlety, sophistication, and, surprisingly, its quiet pace, which requires more interaction and involvement from the viewer, Genius, directed by Michael Grandage, sets a new standard for melding a superior and literate script with a superb cast and thoughtful direction that, at least to this audience, sets a new standard.

Hollywood has become associated with the cheap, the tawdry, the overexposed (in all senses), and the CGI trick trompe l’oeil green-screen that robs the actor of real opponents or adversaries, and the viewer of credulity.

Not Genius.

Colin Firth as legendary editor of the century’s most protean writers Max Perkins does something few films before attempt: he makes editing supremely watchable and deeply professional. It is not a career that is given to easy encapsulation or animation, but Firth accomplishes that. His Perkins is a solemn soul, a deeply integritous soul, whose commitment to excellence and none less is visible in his pauses, pregnant taciturnity and hesitancies. Lovely Laura Linney is luminous and touching, managing to say more in her facial composure and difficulties than most could say with paragraphs of dialogue.

Editors elsewhere are a faceless, unacknowledged suitcase of ciphers, even as Perkins/Firth tells Jude Law/Thomas Wolfe — they are often invisible, if they have succeeded in their task to bring forth a better work from the mountain of pages presented them. (We choose to think the result is both better and truer than had it been left untouched, as many writers seem to prefer.)

Jude Law magnificently embodies the quicksilver ebullience, self-doubt, flamboyance and wit of the brilliant Wolfe. Guy Pearce is a tormented and constipated Fitzgerald, and Vanessa Kirby as his blocked, maddening and maddened wife Zelda is also fine. Nicole Kidman is amazing in her capture of the imperious but besotted Aline Bernstein, such that one cannot look away from her nuanced moment by moment histrionics-cum-bleeding reality. What a powerful ensemble is amassed here, with each person possessed of his own rhythm, his own arguable pace, yet melding intoxicatingly into this moving, enlightening, mesmerizing film, one that easily bests the lesser mere entertainments of the year for genuine emotion, heart, and intelligence.

From the candidate that a majority of Americans- including Democrats- do not consider trustworthy….her words:

‘Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said “Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust.” What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted?”

We still do not know who or what is responsible for the crash of EgyptAir Flight 804, but we know this much for certain: The terrorist danger is growing, and it won’t be contained to the Mediterranean.

Responding to criticism of President Obama’s handling of terrorism, White House press secretary Josh Earnest boasted Thursday of all the setbacks the Islamic State has experienced in recent months, noting that in Iraq “45 percent of the populated area that ISIL previously controlled has been retaken from them. In Syria, that figure is now 20 percent.”

That’s like a patient who ignored a cancer diagnosis bragging that he finally reduced the tumor in his lung — glossing over the fact that he let it spread and metastasize to his other organs. If he had attacked the Islamic State cancer early, Obama could have stopped it from spreading in the first place. But instead, he dismissed the terrorist group as the “JV team” that was “engaged in various local power struggles and disputes” and did not have “the capacity and reach of a bin Laden” and did not pose “a direct threat to us.” He did nothing, while the cancer grew in Syria and then spread in Iraq.

Now the cancer has spread and metastasized across the world.

According to a recent CNN analysis, since declaring its caliphate in 2014, the Islamic State has carried out 90 attacks in 21 countries outside of Iraq and Syria that have killed 1,390 people and injured more than 2,000 others. The Islamic State has a presence in more than a dozen countries and has declared “provinces” in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Post reported in 2015 that “since the withdrawal of most U.S. and international troops in December, the Islamic State has steadily made inroads in Afghanistan” where it has “poured pepper into the wounds of their enemies . . . seared their hands in vats of boiling oil . . . blindfolded, tortured and blown apart [villagers] with explosives buried underneath them.”

On the day an EgyptAir plane carrying 66 people disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea, White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that investigators will look into all “potential factors that may have contributed to this tragedy.” (White House)

And while the Islamic State spreads and grows, al-Qaeda is making a comeback. Obama is touting the killing of Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour as “an important milestone,” but the truth is that the Taliban has made major military gains in Afghanistan — and that has opened the door to al-Qaeda. The Post reported in October that “American airstrikes targeted what was ‘probably the largest’ al-Qaeda training camp found in the 14-year Afghan war.” Sounds good except for one small problem: There were no major al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan when Obama took office. Now it is once again training terrorists in the land where it trained operatives for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

FROM Hillary Agonistes Facing a free-wheeling Trump, she is weighted down by tons of baggage. By Victor Davis Hanson **** posted below

“Trump is many things. But he is not the fascist that neo-cons now rail against (their warnings of constitutional usurpation ironically far better apply to the concrete record of the last eight years, in which Obama has simply suspended enforcement of federal law whenever he found it politically convenient to do so, and either has turned government agencies — IRS, ICE, EPA, NSA, VA, NASA, the Secret Service — into rogue extensions of the White House or staffed them with partisan incompetents). In truth, Trump has no delineated agenda, nor is he doctrinaire in the fashion of a 20th-century European demagogue. Instead, his message is unscripted bombast, and it runs on emotion, not ideology, geared not to some grand autocratic vision but to how to stay ahead of the 24-hour news cycle and channel and exploit the venom Americans feel for Washington elites. Trump has tossed a ball and chain into the wide screen of the political establishment and shattered the glass. No one — not his 16 former Republican rivals nor Hillary Clinton — knows quite how to handle him, since he can say or do anything on any given day that no other candidate would even contemplate.

Older than Clinton, Trump comes across as far more vigorous and vital; he’s a loudmouth, but his voice is not shrill and screeching as is Clinton’s; his political incorrectness both offends and attracts, while her political correctness merely bores and has rendered her a caricature of an opportunistic toady. A wheeler-dealer roguish businessman, Trump is not yet facing criminal indictment; a lifelong government apparatchik, Clinton is courting a rendezvous with the law. Clinton still fakes regional accents; oddly, the orange-haired, combed-over Trump never does. When Trump is caught lying he often just shrugs and says without shame that he has changed his opinions; when Clinton is caught lying, she denies the lying and usually attacks the questioner. In the end, Trump makes it appear that hosting The Apprentice leads to far better political instincts than Yale Law School and the subsequent establishment CV.”

Obama’s final tour of shame continues with a jaunt to Vietnam. After its Communist leader repeatedly quoted Ho Chi Minh, Obama went to his own anti-American talking points.

For you, that conflict was a bitter memory. But today, Vietnam and America show the world that hearts can change and peace is possible. And we thank Secretary Kerry and all our veterans here today, both Vietnamese and American, who had the courage not only to fight, but, more importantly, had the courage to make peace.

I think oftentimes our veterans can show us the way. One American veteran came here and described meeting a former North Vietnamese soldier. “He came up and shook my hand, and now we’re friends,” this veteran said. “Without the high-powered politicians, people can just get along as human beings.”

It’s clever of Obama to put his agenda in the mouth of some unnamed veteran even while suggesting that American veterans died and were wounded in Vietnam for nothing.

Obama not only fails to acknowledge their sacrifice, but he effectively erases it and replaces it with a Zinnian insistence that the Vietnam War was the work of politicians. But then when you form common cause with Communists, you can’t acknowledge that Communism might be an aggressive and murderous ideology. And that fighting it might be justified.

Obama dismisses the “courage to fight” and replaces it with the “courage to make peace” which is more important. The only Vietnam War veterans worth honoring are appeasers like Kerry.

The next administration will face a number of important nuclear policy decisions. On May 13, I invited Franklin Miller, a Principal in the Scowcroft Group, and a former top White House defense official, to discuss these matters before an audience of Congressional staff, senior administration defense and security officials, top staff from defense and security public policy organizations, defense media, defense industry officials and a number of allied embassy colleagues. It was interestingly the 1400th seminar I have hosted on the Hill since 1983 on key defense and national security matters.

Franklin Miller in his prepared remarks extensively addressed the nature of the current debate on future nuclear modernization and whether the US force was obsolete, unaffordable, destabilizing or an obstacle to further arms control. Those remarks were posted recently by Family Security Matters.

However, what has not yet been published is the extensive discussion after his formal remarks. Here, Franklin Miller reviewed five important issues at some length. They were: first, what kind of nuclear posture review should the next administration undertake; second, should the United States consider adopting was in known as a minimal deterrent strategy; third, is nuclear deterrence simply a strategy of what is commonly referred to as “mutual assured destruction”; fourth, should the US switch to a policy of reliance upon tactical nuclear weapons; and fifth, what is the proper role of nuclear deterrence.

Here is an edited transcript of that discussion.

Question: If there was going to be a Nuclear Posture Review in the future, what would you like to see accomplished?

MR. MILLER: If there’s a Nuclear Posture Review, and I’ve testified to this in front of the Senate, I think it should be very, very different from the ones that we’ve had in the past. I don’t believe in a congressionally mandated Nuclear Posture Review. The most successful Nuclear Posture Review that was ever held was held between 1989 and 1991 in the Defense Department, and it resulted — it didn’t go in with this intention, but it resulted in a much improved war plan and a 65 percent cut in our deployed weapons requirements.

When you have all the publicity and hoopla surrounding a Nuclear Posture Review, you create expectations that things have to change. In fact, if you go back and look historically, even though some administrations back in the ‘60s — you know, we went from “strategic sufficiency” to “essential equivalence” and all that — suggested that our policy changed each time a new administration came in, it didn’t happen. U.S. nuclear policy has been remarkably consistent. There’s been some play on the margins with regard to which programs to have in it, but the policy has been consistent. And it’s important that we demonstrate consistency and not raise expectations for change, unless of course radical change would be called for.

But I think the Nuclear Posture Review, such as it is, ought to be conducted within the Pentagon by civilian and military officials. It ought to be briefed to the secretary of Defense and the secretary ought to take any recommendations coming from that to the president, vice president, the national security adviser, you can bring in the secretary of State. And then, and only then, once we’ve established what our nuclear deterrent requirements are, then you bring in the NSC and the State Department to talk about arms control.

China under President Xi is finding it easy to give the U.S. under President Obama a swift boot in the rear.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has succeeded in gaining more power than any Chinese leader has had since that nation suffered the upheavals of the 1970s. His success in doing so is attributable to Barack Obama and Sun Tzu.

To say that eight years of Obama’s — and Hillary Clinton’s — foreign policy has left power vacuums around the world is a rather important cliché. China, under Xi, is one of the two powers most eager to fill them, the other being Putin’s Russia. Putin is more impatient than Xi, seizing the Crimea and a good chunk of Ukraine, venturing into Syria, in partnership with Iran, to ensure the survival of Assad’s terrorist regime.

Xi is more patient, clearly more successful and less eager to show off before the news cameras. He’s satisfied with building China’s enormous military to achieve greater capabilities and to install the ability to speed-lace the South China Sea. As Sun Tzu wrote about 2300 years ago, the greatest general is he who can win the battle without fighting. That’s the strategy behind Xi’s ability to fill the vacuum left by Obama.

Good hiking boots replace eyelets with rounded hooks which laces can be looped around to put the boots on and get going much faster than the wearer could otherwise. By building miniature military bases around a dominant quadrangle in the South China Sea, on territory that’s not China’s but is also claimed by a variety of nations, Xi is putting in the rounded hooks that will soon enable China to lace up and control that sea.

In 2014 students and faculty at Rutgers University protested the planned commencement address from Condoleezza Rice. The protesters claimed that the first black woman to serve as secretary of state, national security adviser and Stanford University provost was an unsuitable speaker because of her association with the administration of George W. Bush. In the collective mind of the campus left, Ms. Rice was, at best, an enabler of a serial warmonger. In the end she bowed out, writing, “commencement should be a time of joyous celebration” and the school’s “invitation to me to speak has become a distraction for the university community at this very special time.”

Two years later not even Democratic female secretaries of state are considered speech-worthy. Students and professors at Scripps College, an all-female liberal-arts school in Claremont, Calif., protested the selection of Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, to deliver this year’s address. The liberal feminist icon is, according to the protesters, a “war criminal” and a “genocide enabler.” Some 28 professors signed a letter saying they wouldn’t attend the ceremony. To her credit, Ms. Albright didn’t bow to the pressure. “People have a right to state their views,” she said. “I also think they have a duty to listen to people that they might disagree with.”

To those familiar with the customs of contemporary leftism, Ms. Albright’s response sounds positively outdated. The 78-year-old diplomat’s conception of liberalism isn’t simply divorced from today’s “postmodern left”—it’s in direct opposition to it.
ENLARGE
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The Closing of the Liberal Mind

By Kim R. Holmes
Encounter, 362 pages, $25.99

How did liberals become so hopelessly illiberal? In “The Closing of the Liberal Mind,” Kim R. Holmes suggests that “the loss of historical memory as to what liberalism was is actually a key to understanding what it is today.” Mr. Holmes, a scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, does an admirable job of reminding readers of that intellectual history, drawing a line from the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill to the original progressive spirit of Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson to the Third Way liberalism of John Rawls and Bill Clinton that synthesized Wilsonian progressivism with Mill’s classical liberalism.

Liberal Jewish group received $576,000 to advocate for Iran nuclear deal, belying its ‘pro-Israel’ pretensions.J-Street received more than half a million dollars to advocate for the Obama administration’s controversial nuclear deal with Iran, it has been revealed.

The liberal Jewish group, which bills itself as “pro-Israel and pro-peace” but which critics say takes solely anti-Israel stances, was paid the money by the White House’s main surrogate organization for selling the deal.

The Ploughshares Fund was named in an explosive New York Times profile of Obama aid Ben Rhodes, in which the President’s chief spin doctor listed the central groups responsible for creating an “echo chamber” in order to promote the deal, even when the White House’s official line didn’t jibe with the facts.

According to Associated Press, the group’s 2015 annual report details several organizations which received substantial funds to peddle the official White House line on the nuclear deal. Among them was National Public Radio (NPR), which received a $100,000 grant to promote “national security reporting that emphasizes the themes of U.S. nuclear weapons policy and budgets, Iran’s nuclear program, international nuclear security topics and U.S. policy toward nuclear security.”

Other grantees included: The Arms Control Association ($282,500); the Brookings Institution ($225,000); and the Atlantic Council ($182,500), who “received money for Iran-related analysis, briefings and media outreach, and non-Iran nuclear work,” according to AP.

The National Iranian American Council received more than $281,000, while Princeton University received a $70,000 grant to support former Iranian ambassador and nuclear spokesman Seyed Hossein Mousavian’s “analysis, publications and policymaker engagement on the range of elements involved with the negotiated settlement of Iran’s nuclear program.”

On Aug. 6, 1806, an imperial herald decked out in full court regalia galloped purposefully through the streets of Vienna to a magnificent medieval church at the center of the city. Once there, he ascended to the balcony, blew his silver trumpet and declared that the Holy Roman Empire, an institution that had lasted for more than 1,000 years, was no more.

The news was hardly unexpected (“as when an old friend is very sick,” recalled Goethe’s mother). Yet grown men—and at least one king—wept as waves of nostalgia rippled across the continent. The empire was many things over its long history, but for a great number of its subjects it was, above all, a defender of the weak against the strong.

It is curious, then, that our modern view of the Holy Roman Empire has been so decisively shaped by its detractors. Voltaire’s quip that it was “in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire” is the most memorable, though not the most vicious, put-down. In 1787, James Madison derided it as “a nerveless body; incapable of regulating its own members; insecure against external dangers; and agitated with unceasing fermentation in its own bowels.” Hegel dismissed the imperial constitution as little more than a collection of round stones that might roll away if nudged. Even the Nazis sought to dissociate themselves from the empire, though it had once comprised most of German-speaking Europe and had for centuries been led by the Vienna-based Habsburgs. In Hitler’s mind, the Holy Roman Empire deserved repudiation because it had failed to achieve true German unity. On June 13, 1939, Nazi Party organizations were banned from using “Third” when referring to the Reich.

It is against such headwinds that Peter H. Wilson, a history professor at Oxford, has written “Heart of Europe,” an ambitious, sprawling tome that seeks to rehabilitate the Holy Roman Empire’s reputation by re-examining its place within the larger sweep of European history. This is no easy task, as Mr. Wilson is well aware, for though the empire lasted more than twice as long as imperial Rome, it had no standing army and no centralized institutions of government; nor was it defined by a single ethnic group. It was also immense, encompassing at least a portion of 11 present-day countries: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and Switzerland.

The empire was born with great fanfare on Christmas Day 800, when the Frankish King Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in a ceremony at St. Peter’s in Rome. The plan was audacious: to resurrect the crown of the Roman Empire in the west, which had been vacant since the Goths ousted the last Roman emperor. To the illiterate warlord Charlemagne, the coronation conferred religious and moral authority. For Leo, it meant protection, for among their many oaths, the emperors swore to defend and safeguard the bishops of Rome. CONTINUE AT SITE