RUTHFULLY YOURS

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com

FRANKLY…THEY ALL MISS THE POINT….FIRST: LEARN FROM HISTORY AND SCUTTLE THE TWO STATE (DIS)SOLUTION. SECOND: IT IS NOT JUST ABOUT IRAN…IT IS ABOUT JIHAD AND ISRAEL IS A STEPPING STONE TO THE INTERNATIONAL CALIPHATE…THIRD: IT IS INSANE TO PROMOTE ANY POLICY IN THE MIDEAST WITHOUT REAL ENERGY INDEPENDENCE AND WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO NAME THE ENEMY….RSK

With Washington, D.C., talking Israeli politics, National Review Online asked experts: “Going into a presidential-election year, what’s a sane, responsible Israel policy?”

ELLIOTT ABRAMS
A sane, responsible Israel policy would reflect reality in the region today. Israel’s cold peace with Egypt may unravel as Islamists grow in power there, and the long-safe border between Israel and the Egyptian Sinai is already unsafe. Jordan’s stability is not certain, and Syria is awash in blood. The Palestinian leadership flirts with Hamas and invites it to join the PLO. And of course Iran’s nuclear-weapons program moves forward relentlessly.

The only firm ally we have in the region is Israel. Accordingly we should (1) maintain our military aid and our diplomatic support for Israel; (2) seek to improve life in the West Bank, with as much self-government for Palestinians and as few Israeli intrusions as security permits, while acknowledging that any final peace agreement is far away; and (3) state clearly the U.S. policy that Iran will never be permitted to acquire nuclear-weapons capability, and that we would support Israel in the aftermath of a military strike (Israel’s or ours) at that program.

Put in the negative, we should stop Obama-style pressures on Israel for negotiations with the Palestinians that cannot at this juncture possibly succeed, and stop undermining Israel’s military credibility against Iran with what the president called “loose talk.” The key concept is simple: Support your friend against your enemy.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303302504577323691134926300.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h
The absurdity of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

Two tragedies are apparent in the Trayvon Martin case. The first is obvious: A teenager—unarmed and committing no crime—was shot dead. Dressed in a “hoodie,” a costume of menace, he crossed paths with a man on the hunt for precisely such clichés of menace. Added to this—and here is the rub—was the fact of his dark skin.

Maybe it was more the hood than the dark skin, but who could argue that the skin did not enhance the menace of the hood at night and in the eyes of someone watching for crime. (Fifty-five percent of all federal prisoners are black though we are only 12% of the population.) Would Trayvon be alive today had he been walking home—Skittles and ice tea in hand—wearing a polo shirt with an alligator logo? Possibly. And does this make the ugly point that dark skin late at night needs to have its menace softened by some show of Waspy Americana? Possibly.

What is fundamentally tragic here is that these two young males first encountered each other as provocations. Males are males, and threat often evokes a narcissistic anger that skips right past reason and into a will to annihilate: “I will take you out!” There was a terrible fight. Trayvon apparently got the drop on George Zimmerman, but ultimately the man with the gun prevailed. Annihilation was achieved.

If this was all there was to it, the Trayvon/Zimmerman story would be no more than a cautionary tale, yet another admonition against the hair-trigger male ego. But this story brought reaction from the White House: “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon,” said the president. The Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, ubiquitous icons of black protest, virtually battled each other to stand at the bereaved family’s side—Mr. Jackson, in a moment of inadvertent honesty, saying, “There is power in blood . . . we must turn a moment into a movement.” And then there was the spectacle of black Democrats in Congress holding hearings on racial profiling with Trayvon’s parents featured as celebrities.

In fact Trayvon’s sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America’s civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the “poetic truth” that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth.

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/index.php/pruden/full_column/when_clever_only_looks_like_dumb

“One outraged pundit decides that Mr. Obama has revealed himself to be “no longer a serious man. Nor an honest one.” This misses the point, too. Barack Obama never was.”

Presidential contempt for the Supreme Court and inconvenient law is not new. But rarely has a president sounded so, well, dumb, as when Barack Obama lectured the justices on what they can and can’t do to his cherished Obamacare.

The court would take an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” if it overturns his health-care scheme because it was enacted by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” the president declared. Obamacare actually cleared the House by only seven votes, 219 to 212, and on their face the president’s remarks betray an astonishing ignorance of the Constitution and how the republic works.

But Barack Obama is neither dumb nor ignorant. The man praised as the greatest orator since Demosthenes celebrated hope and change in ancient Greece knows better than to bandy words foolishly. So why would he say something so foolish and dumb?

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/111074/sec_id/111074
The play within the play
In October 2011 an extraordinary opportunity to apprehend the ill-defined “Middle East” conflict was offered in the form of a play within the play. Discourse was disabled by flesh and blood images acting out the drama with exquisite unity and perfect casting. Playing the role of Israel, Gilad Shalit, courageous survivor of five years of unspeakable deprivation, emerged frail, pale but gloriously resistant. The little that we know of the conditions of his imprisonment is already too much. Kidnapped at the age of 19 near the Kerem Shalom crossing in Israel (two IDF soldiers were killed in the cross-border attack), held in some sort of dungeon, starved of human company, starved of daylight, undernourished, not even given eyeglasses with which to see the ugly contours of his constricted world, Gilad stood before us, a miraculous survivor. The celestial light of dignity suffused his flesh and bones with metaphysical force.
What decent human being would not have misgivings about the release, in exchange for Shalit, of 1027 murderers, thieves, and thugs determined to use their liberation as a license to renew the persecution of Israeli Jews?

Another Tack: Obama of the open mic ‘The tongue weighs practically nothing,” notes the anonymous aged adage, “but so few folks can hold it.’ Some supercilious sorts don’t even seem to try too hard – like American President Barack Obama, given to remarkable and repetitive chattiness when he’s precariously near open microphones. He is so accident-prone, […]

Reading the paper the other day, I came across a story about Jews (“Jewish settlers”) being ordered, by Israeli officials, to leave some of their new homes in Hebron. Naturally, Hebron’s location was given as the “West Bank,” and Jews were portrayed as merely militant troublemakers in someone else’s land.

Nowhere was it mentioned–and rarely ever is–that Jews have lived and owned land in Hebron for about 4,000 years, clear up to the 20th century, when they were massacred by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s.

David, son of Jesse (born in another “West Bank” town, Bethlehem), was crowned King of Israel in Hebron and had some of his children there. A thousand years earlier, Abraham had made Hebron known to the world in the first place by purchasing a burial plot there for many of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/04/climategate_heads_to_court.html As a climate scientist, I am quite familiar with the background facts that Prof Michael E. Mann (now at Penn State U) so shamelessly distorts in his new book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. First, the scientific background: Mann’s claim to fame derives from his contentious (and […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/295248/social-darwinism-andrew-c-mccarthy
The one and only.

After hearing President Obama’s hilarious diatribe against the Ryan budget — a timid document that adds trillions to the deficit, takes a generation to bring the federal budget into balance, and makes zero effort to cancel out the innumerable departments, agencies, and programs that have exploded the federal micromanagement of American life — I have a question for the community-organizer-in-chief.
In light of his froth over this Ryanesque scourge of “Social Darwinism,” does the president favor repealing the laws that prohibit Americans from feeding the animals at the national parks that Obama risibly accuses Representative Ryan of trying to shut down?
You’ve probably seen the signs — they befoul the scenery throughout the Grand Canyon, Acadia, Yellowstone, the Everglades, Yosemite, etc. No food for the fauna. The Darwinists at the U.S. Park Service claim that animals must learn to fend for themselves if they are to survive and thrive. When you feed animals, the bureaucrats coldly explain, they become dependents and no longer function as nature intends. They lose their capacity to make their own way. They fill up on foods that are harmful to their digestive systems. There is a dulling of the instincts that help wildlife avoid danger — they lose the fear of humans and cars, leading many of them to be killed while expecting to find food on the roadside. Some signs are downright mean in admonishing: “A fed animal is a dead animal.”
Mr. President, where is the empathy?

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11737/pub_detail.asp
I am subject to various enthusiasms and, in 2008, I wrote a series about beef and the vast network of phony consumer advocates, vegetarian types, animal rights groups and headline chasing media folks who love a good scare campaign, all trying to convince Americans that beef was bad for them.

Today, it is a smear campaign about a type of meat promoted in the media as “pink slime.” Typically, it is a pack of lies and it’s going to cost some folks their jobs and drive up the cost of beef if allowed to go unchallenged.

What is being demonized in this 21st century reincarnation of the 1989 Alar apple scare is finely textured, 95% lean beef. It is composed of small parts of beef that are still available for use after the cuts with which we are more accustomed, like sirloin, brisket, top round, flank, porterhouse, and some forty other selections, are taken.

* VIDEOS * TODAY’S HOT PICKS *

1. BREAKING: It’s On: 5th Circuit Dares Obama to Deny Power of Judicial Review
2. VIDEO: Bret Baier GRILLS Jay Carney over Senate refusal to vote on budget in over 1,000 days
3. VIDEO: Judge Andrew Napolitano ripped into the president for inaccuracies in his argument for the law and against the Court
4. VIDEO: Greta asks Wasserman-Schultz: Should Obama pressure Harry Reid and the Senate to produce a budget? – Wasserman: “Not True” Reid Won’t Put Obama Budget to a Vote
5. VIDEO: Why would potential military plans be leaked to the media about how Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities?
6. VIDEO: O’Reilly Maintains that Taxpayer Money is Being Wasted at a Colossal Rate
7. VIDEO: CNN Meteorologist Attributes Texas Twisters to ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’
8. VIDEO: VP Biden to High School Girls: ‘Pregnancy is Pre-Existing Condition’
9. VIDEO: Nikki Haley Argues Contraception when appearing on ‘The View’
10. Proof That Obama is Linked to Radical Alinsky