RUTHFULLY YOURS

What have we come to? Consider April. Alexander Hamilton was allowed to remain on the ten-dollar bill because of a Broadway musical. Curt Schilling was fired from his job at ESPN because he had the audacity to say: “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves.” Harvard College deemed single sex “final clubs” dens of iniquity, but a “sex fair” made brighter an already “enlightened” university? Facing charges of child molestation, but, even so, named ambassador for President Obama’s Latino and Black youth programs, rapper Rick Ross was invited to the White House. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe signed an executive order giving the right-to-vote to 206,000 ex-cons. In a muddled statement regarding the desperate financial situation facing New York City hospital’s, Mayor William de Blasio asserted: “There will be no lay-offs, but there will be staff reductions.” Overseas, Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a 2012 shooting rampage, claimed that isolation in his three-room suite, which includes windows, a treadmill, fridge, TV and Sony PlayStation, violated his human rights and posed a threat to his mental well-being.

Andrew Jackson was never on my short list of great Presidents; so Harriet Tubman, in my opinion, is a good replacement. But the initial instinct of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was to toss Alexander Hamilton into the distaff sea. That showed either a remarkable ignorance of history, or a deliberate attempt to sabotage the man who first held the office he now holds. It is ironic that the left, which claims that Republican religious and social orthodoxies deprive them of believing in science, should condemn a man whose observation was based on the definitive science of chromosomes. Despite a study she had commissioned that found 87% of campus sexual assaults occurred in University-owned and operated dorms, Harvard’s president Drew Faust found fault with clubs that are independent of the College. She expressed no concern that a University-sponsored fair displaying vibrators, dildos and other sex toys will have any effect on the male libido. During his White House visit Mr. Ross had his ankle bracelet alarm go off, which presumably amused any youths that were present. As for Governor McAuliffe, he later denied to reporters that his motivation was political – the possibility that the almost 4% extra votes might help Mrs. Clinton never crossed his mind! There is nothing I can add to Mr. de Blasio’s verbal contortions. As for the cold-blooded killer Breivik who certainly had mental health problems before going to jail, the Norwegian judge decided his rights were being violated, that he should not be held in isolation…and that the Norwegian people should pay his legal bills. The moral in Aesop’s fable of the frog and the scorpion: real, embedded evil cannot be countered by benevolence.

The planet is out of control. Perhaps it is not greenhouse gasses that is the cause of climate change, but the verbal bovine faeces that vents from Washington, Brussels and other places of political power? Mark Twain must feel a sense of omniscience. Freedom of speech continues to be denied conservatives on campuses. Will it now be denied by Congress? Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has asked the Justice Department to bring civil cases against “climate dissenters,” using RICO statutes. We live in a world that condemns Israelis as racists for their treatment of Palestinians, but condone misogynist Muslim men for treating women as slaves. In Luddite-like fashion, Vermont decided that advancements in biotechnology should not apply to food eaten by “Green Mountaineers.” Up seems to be down; right is wrong; east is west. I am reminded of Roberto Binigni in Down by Law: “It’s a sad and beautiful world.” (Maybe “strange” and “crazy” would be better?) Will we right this ship that is foundering in a sea of dissembled ignorance and moral and cultural relativism, or are we doomed to another dark age?

April may not be, as T.S. Eliot once claimed, the cruelest month, but last month had its share of tragedies. The month saw two earthquakes in Japan and one in Ecuador. Dozens died in Japan and more than 480 in Ecuador. Five hundred refugees from Africa drowned, as their over-crowded boat sank in the Mediterranean. Through the 26th of April, according to Wikipedia, 478 people were killed during the month in dozens of terrorist acts in twenty-five countries on four continents. Hundreds more were wounded. Iran, trying to appear noble in Western eyes, announced that it may send Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, to help fight ISIS, another terrorist group. Vladimir Putin, a progenitor of terror and crime, announced plans for a “several-hundred-thousand strong national guard” to fight terrorism and organized crime! It smacks of Mussolini’s “Black Shirts,” the paramilitary wing of Italy’s National Fascist Party.

On Thursday morning, sailors on board the USS Cole were lining up for an early lunch. Seventeen of them died as an Al Qaeda bomb on board a fishing boat tore through the hull outside the galley. The dead included 15 men and 2 women, one of whom had a young child. For three weeks the crew of the USS Cole struggled to keep their ship from sinking while working waist deep in water with bucket brigades, sleeping on the deck and living surrounded by the terrible aftermath of the terrorist attack.

The survivors, wounded and whole, received the words “Glory is the Reward of Valor” written on the bent steel removed from the site of the explosion that tore through their ship and their lives.

The President of the United States promised that justice would be done. “To those who attacked them we say: You will not find a safe harbor. We will find you and justice will prevail.”

Despite Clinton’s words, justice did not prevail.

The father of Home Maintenance Technician Third Class Kenneth Eugene Clodfelter believed that there would be justice, but he was to be disappointed. “I just felt, for sure, you know, they’re not going to go ahead and just kiss off the lives of 17 U.S. sailors,” he said. “In fact, they didn’t do anything.”

Walid bin Attash, a planner of the USS Cole bombing and who also played a role in the 9/11 attack, is still at Gitmo. His trial continues to drag on while he and his lawyers play games. Rahim Hussein al-Nashiri, another of the planners, is still awaiting trial. But Mashur Abdallah Ahmed al Sabri, one of the members of the USS Cole cell, has already been released by Barack Obama from Guantanamo Bay.

Sabri was rated as a high risk terrorist who is ”is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and allies”, but that was no obstacle for Obama who had already fired one Secretary of Defense for being slow to free dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists and was browbeating his latest appointee over the same issue.

The very paperwork that was used as the basis for the decision to free Sabri describes him as “a member of a Yemeni al-Qaida cell directly involved with the USS Cole attack”. This cell “conducted surveillance” on the targeted vessel and “prepared explosives for the bombing”. Sabri had been arrested in Yemen for his involvement in the attack before he managed to make his way to Afghanistan.

Now he is a free man and has been sent back to the homeland of terrorism, Saudi Arabia.

The Farmer and the Snake

A Farmer walked through his field one cold winter morning. On the ground lay a Snake, stiff and frozen with the cold. The Farmer knew how deadly the Snake could be, and yet he picked it up and put it in his bosom to warm it back to life.

The Snake soon revived, and when it had enough strength, bit the man who had been so kind to it. The bite was deadly and the Farmer felt that he must die. “Oh,” cried the Farmer with his last breath, “I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel.”

The Greatest Kindness Will Not Bind the Ungrateful.

The moral of this Aesopian fable from a mere 2500 years ago is that doing good to evil will only lead to more evil. Aiding those who kill only brings more death, not life. It is human nature to think that people will return good for good and evil for evil. This kind of thinking perversely leads some to assume that if they are being assaulted, then they must have done something to deserve it. This logic is routinely used to argue that Islamic terrorists are simply paying us back in the same coin.

But the assumption that evil exists because evil has been done to someone else, tracing back to an original primal evil of injustice that can only be healed with social justice, is itself evil.

In September 1 1939, W.H Auden responded to Hitler’s invasion of Poland by penning the lines;

Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return

Those same lines have been routinely taken up by those eager to pen their own apologetics for evil. In the wake of another early September, September 11th, Auden’s poem was re-embraced once again by those penning essays explaining why we were the real terrorists to whom evil had been done in return for our own evil.

But while it is easy enough to dismiss W.H. Auden as naive, snakes don’t always look the way you expect them to. Particularly snakes who take refuge in the mind of man. Auden was more snake than farmer and his words were the snake-words of one scaly creature excusing the evil of another.

In September 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany had an agreement. And the man who two years earlier had penned the line, “The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” in his poem Spain, when referring to the Soviet atrocities in Spain, was not a pacifist. He was one of the snakes.

In time Auden would describe his poem as ”infected with an incurable dishonesty”. The infection, the snake bite of incurable dishonesty, passes through the words. The dishonesty is a poisonous disease.

Are those who go on to quote “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”, to excuse and justify terrorism the farmer or the snake? On the surface of it, there is no clearer or simpler justification of evil than these lines. They presume that anyone who does evil, has been first sinned against. And while that may not entirely render them guiltless, it clearly spreads the guilt around and adds a touch of morally equivalent white paint to the murderous figure crouching in the center of the room.

The Agony of the Arab Spring
Of the five countries where citizens rose up in 2011, only Tunisia is relatively stable and free. It also produces the most Islamic State recruits.

In early 2011, two young Syrian women named Aliaa and Noura whiled away spring mornings strolling to university or lying on Aliaa’s bed talking about suitors. Dark-haired Aliaa was the daughter of an Alawite military officer; blond Noura was the daughter of a well-known Sunni doctor.

They lived in Jableh, an ancient Phoenician port where the Sunni center of town, with its cafes and Mediterranean promenade, is surrounded by green hills of Alawite and Christian villages. Aliaa and Noura were the best of friends.

Then came the Arab Spring. In Syria, it began five years ago last month. By 2013, Noura was a refugee in Turkey, and Aliaa was worrying that, “if Bashar [al-Assad] falls . . . we, here, will all be in the niqab [the Muslim face veil], or we will be dead.” Noura had once promised to name her first daughter after Aliaa. Now the Sunni was accusing her former friend of trying to convert her to Shiism, and the Alawite thought she had discovered a pattern of Saudi links in her friend’s behavior during those happier days.

“Their friendship belonged to a world that no longer made sense,” writes New York Times reporter Robert F. Worth in “A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS.” “They had redefined each other, little by little, as enemies.”

There is a growing fear that North Korea’s development and testing of nuclear weapons could trigger the use of nuclear weapons for the first time in seventy years.

But the catalyst to such a catastrophe may be not actions by North Korea but an ill-considered decision by the United States.

In frustration over the seeming intractability of the Korean nuclear “problem”, some analysts are proposing that the US cut and run and “fold up its extended nuclear umbrella” over South Korea.

This despite the fact that our collective deterrent with our allies has kept the peace in the western pacific since the end of the Korean War.

One particular strange idea comes from Doug Bandow in an April 19, 2016 essay in the Huffington Post. Bandow has long pushed for the US to leave our South Korean allies to the tender mercies of Pyongyang.

He now fears that the DPRK might indeed use its nuclear weapons against the Republic of Korea and as a result, drag the United States into defending Seoul. That is because for the past many decades, the United States had pledged to protect South Korea by placing our nuclear umbrella over their country to dissuade any adversary such as North Korea from attacking Seoul.

Thus Bandow concludes our nuclear deterrent umbrella should be quickly “folded up” and put away.

In short, nuclear deterrence provided by the United States, having succeeded for 60 years, is now no longer valuable.

Why?

Even with the US nuclear umbrella over Seoul, Bandow thinks it may not be enough to deter Pyongyang. He has the strange idea that North Korea, with perhaps dozens of nuclear weapons, would attack South Korea and risk war with the United States, which has nearly two thousand deployed nuclear weapons in its strategic arsenal.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure.

He came on the show to discuss How “Rules of Engagement” Get U.S. Soldiers Killed, unveiling the disgraceful and deadly cost America pays for obeying Islamic laws in Afghanistan.

Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2016/04/26/how-rules-of-engagement-get-u-s-soldiers-killed-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

Reprinted from Hoover.org.

The sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has reminded us of the great divide in opinion over how the Constitution should be interpreted. Scalia was the most influential and consequential adherent of “originalism” or “textualism.” In Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992), he succinctly defined this approach: “Texts and traditions are facts to study, not convictions to demonstrate about.” Since the Constitution is a written text, a judge has the obligation to discern “the plain, original meaning of the constitutional text,” as he said later in NLRB vs. Canning (2014). The alternative is to substitute “freewheeling interpretations” that serve politics and ideology rather than the Constitution’s precepts and principles, and the traditional understanding of its words. “The Constitution,” Scalia said in a speech in 2012, “is not a living organism. It’s a legal document, and it says what it says and doesn’t say what it doesn’t say.”

Scalia was a foe of the idea of the “living Constitution,” as his phrase “living organism” shows. Progressive President Woodrow Wilson was one of the first to espouse the view Scalia rejects. The Founders’ Constitution, with its balance of powers, Wilson said, was a “variety of mechanics” founded on the “law of gravitation.” But a government is a “living thing” that falls under “the theory of organic life” and so is “modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, [and] shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.” Thus, according to the influential progressive writer Herbert Croly, to better govern and improve the nation, the people had to discard the “strong, almost dominant tendency to regard the existing Constitution with superstitious awe, and to shrink with horror from modifying it even in the smallest degree.” The assumption is that the Founders could never have anticipated the novel technological and social changes in America that had rendered the Constitution an anachronism.

That same assumption underlies much “living Constitution” jurisprudence today. Changing social mores have led Supreme Court justices to tease out of the Constitution “rights” it never mentions. In Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965), Justice William O. Douglas discovered a right to privacy in the Constitution’s “emanations” and “penumbras,” and in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood (1992), Anthony Kennedy found “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Subsequent decisions on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage have followed the same imperative to “plug the gaps,” as Judge Richard Posner has put it, left in the Constitution by changes in technology and progress in social habits, values, and beliefs.

This conflict between how the Constitution should be interpreted, however, is the result of a deeper, more ancient clash of ideas––how we understand human nature. Are core human attributes––particularly the destructive appetites and passions––permanent aspects of the human condition? Or is human nature “plastic” and able to be improved once environmental obstacles like poverty or ignorance are removed, and after better political, economic, and social institutions are created?

President Obama faces contentious meetings with European and Gulf state leaders during his trip this week to Europe and Saudi Arabia. Why? Because of his continuing refusal to adopt a serious strategy to defeat ISIS, confront Iran’s increasingly belligerent behavior, and his inexplicable comments published in an April 2016 Atlantic article that blamed Europe and Gulf states for his administration’s growing list of foreign policy failures.

The Atlantic article will lead to some awkward questions for Mr. Obama from the leaders of America’s closest allies.

For example, the president will undoubtably be asked by European and Gulf state leaders to explain how, after his administration ignored the growing crisis in Libya for the past four years and his 2011 “leading from behind” strategy during the Libyan civil war, he can criticize European and Gulf states of being “free riders” and not having “skin in the game” in the Libyan situation.

I imagine British Prime Minister Cameron will say to the president, “But Mr. Obama, France and the United Kingdom took the lead in fighting that war because you refused to.”

Saudi leaders are more concerned about Obama’s comment in the Atlantic article that Saudi Arabia needs to find a way to “share the neighborhood” with Iran and “institute some sort of cold peace.” These incoherent remarks must have enraged Saudi officials in light of the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran which they strongly oppose and a recent surge in Iranian missile tests.

Obama’s tin-eared comments about Saudi Arabia may be why Saudi King Salman was not there to greet him when the president’s plane landed in Riyadh Wednesday. The King did greet other heads of state when they arrived, according to Reuters.

Given the way he has ignored Saudi security concerns and tilted toward Iran during his presidency, I assume the Saudis have written off Mr. Obama and recognize that most experts in Washington – Republican and Democrat – do not share his radical and disjointed foreign policy views. The Saudis know their strong relationship with the United States will survive Barack Obama’s presidency. But even if they do understand this, Saudi leaders also know that this president’s failed Middle East policies did enormous damage to Middle East security that they will have to live with for many years to come.

“If Mr. Obama left office today he’d leave the relationships with America’s three most important partners worse than when he found them; and relations with one of Washington’s erstwhile adversaries – Iran — better.”

Life’s about learning, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young famously sang. And it may well be that in the last year of his presidency, Barack Obama is finally learning that imperfect partners in the Middle East are better than no partners at all, particularly for a president disinclined to invest in a large U.S. presence in the region.

None of this means that relations with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel will fundamentally improve before 2017 — too many divergent interests preclude that. But recent U.S. efforts suggest that Mr. Obama may at least want to stabilize them. With the Middle East a mess, he can’t afford to hand to his successor three relationships in crisis.

Mr. Obama’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia – his fourth since taking office (he’s visited Israel and Egypt only once) reflects the continued importance of the Kingdom in U.S. foreign policy, however strained the relationship has become. Declining dependence on Arab hydrocarbons, differences over Iran and Syria, and the famously missing 28 pages in the 2002 Congressional report that might contain damning information on official Saudi knowledge or role in 9/11 have injected tension into the relationship. Still, the president’s visit wasn’t a disaster and led to new areas of cooperation between the U.S. and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Mr. Obama is likely to hand over to his successor a U.S.-Saudi relationship that, while still fraught with significant divides, is functional and working to the advantage of both.