RUTHFULLY YOURS

At 7:53 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, the first assault wave of Japanese fighter planes attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, taking the Americans completely by surprise.

The first wave targeted airfields and battleships. The second wave targeted other ships and shipyard facilities. The air raid lasted until 9:45 a.m. Eight battleships were damaged, with five sunk. Three light cruisers, three destroyers and three smaller vessels were lost along with 188 aircraft. The Japanese lost 27 planes and five midget submarines which attempted to penetrate the inner harbor and launch torpedoes.

Three prime targets; the U.S. Pacific Fleet aircraft carriers, Lexington, Enterprise and Saratoga, were not in the harbor and thus escaped damage.

The casualty list at Pearl Harbor included 2,335 servicemen and 68 civilians killed, and 1,178 wounded. Over a thousand crewmen aboard the USS Arizona battleship were killed after a 1,760 pound aerial bomb penetrated the forward magazine causing catastrophic explosions.
Three days later, December 11th, Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, both declared war on the United States. The U.S. Congress responded immediately by declaring war on them. Thus the European and Southeast Asian wars had become a global conflict with the Axis Powers; Japan, Germany, Italy and others, aligned against the Allied Powers; America, Britain, Soviet Russia and others.

President Obama’s Sunday night speech was about three-quarters of what the cynics and his critics expected. The lone bits of good news were the president’s belated acknowledgement that the Fort Hood shooting was terrorism – not “workplace violence” – and that he didn’t announce any new executive orders dealing with gun control.

For starters, the optics of this speech were very strange – why stand in front of the desk in the Oval Office? Did he get poked or get makeup in his left eye right before he went on air? He seemed to be squinting. The only other time the president addressed the country on Sunday night, he announced the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. One expected something new, groundbreaking, or different. Instead, he offered the same proposals and same arguments.

At this point in his presidency, Obama speaks with only one tone, the slightly exasperated and sometimes not-merely-slightly exasperated “adult in the room” who constantly has to correct his fellow Americans, who are always flying off the handle, calling for options that “aren’t who we are,” betraying our values, and so on. He’s always so disappointed in us.

At certain points, Obama sounded as if he was speaking to children. “The threat is real, but we will overcome it.” “We will not defeat it with tough talk, abandoning our values, or giving in to fear.” “We will prevail by being strong and smart.”

President Obama showed Sunday night that he realizes the growing threat from Islamist terror is a grave risk to his political standing in his last year in office. What he didn’t show is that he is willing to consider any changes to his failing strategy to defeat the threat from Islamic State.

The President’s 13-minute Oval Office speech, only the third of his tenure, at last acknowledged that last week’s attack in San Bernardino by a radicalized Islamist couple was an “act of terrorism.” It would have been hard for him to say otherwise after his own FBI director, James Comey, had admitted this reality on Friday. Mr. Obama was looking increasingly detached from reality, and the speech was an attempt to recover from his claims that the growing jihadist threat is “contained.”

Yet the President devoted most of his speech to defending the strategy he has pursued for 16 months against Islamic State without much success. He cited his bombing campaign, but he didn’t mention that the vast majority of sorties drop no bombs because of the limits he has placed on the military. He mentioned the recent allied bombing of Islamic State’s oil infrastructure, but then why has the U.S. waited so long to take this initiative?

This must be Obama’s idea of gun control for the military.

Actually, it’s quite serious. The Air Force chief of staff, General Mark Welsh, said in a statement that we’ve dropped 20,000 bombs and missiles on ISIS since the war began 15 months ago and the supplies are not being replenished at a fast enough rate.

CNN:

As the U.S. ramps up its campaign against the Islamist terror group in Iraq and Syria, the Air Force is now “expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force chief of staff Gen. Mark Welsh said in a statement.

“B-1s have dropped bombs in record numbers. F-15Es are in the fight because they are able to employ a wide range of weapons and do so with great flexibility. We need the funding in place to ensure we’re prepared for the long fight,” Welsh said in the statement. “This is a critical need.”

The bombing campaign has left the U.S. Air Force with what an Air Force official described as munitions depot stocks “below our desired objective.”

1. Chanukah’s historical context according to the four Books of the Maccabees, The Scroll of Antiochus and The War of the Jews by Joseph Ben Mattityahu (Josephus Plavius): In 175 BCE, the Seleucid Emperor Antiochus (IV) Epiphanies of Syria (one third of the disintegrated Greek Empire) wished to exterminate Judaism and forcibly convert Jews to Hellenic values, suspecting that the Jews were allies of his chief rival, Egypt. In 169 BCE, upon his return to Syria from a war against Egypt, Antiochus (IV) devastated Jerusalem, massacred Jews, forbade the practice of Judaism and desecrated the Temple. The 167 BCE Jewish rebellion featured the Hasmonean (Maccabee) family: Mattityahu, a priest from the town of Modi’in, and his five sons, Yochanan, Judah, Shimon, Yonatan and Elazar. The heroic, creative battle tactics of the Maccabees, were consistent with the reputation of Jews as superb warriors, who were frequently hired as mercenaries by Egypt, Syria, Rome and other global and regional powers. The battles of the Maccabees inspired the Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire from the battle against Pompey in 63 BCE through the end of the Bar Kokhba Rebellion in 135 CE.

2. Israel’s Founding Father, David Ben Gurion: “The struggle of the Maccabees was one of the most dramatic clashes of civilizations in human history…. The Maccabees overcame one of the most magnificent spiritual, political and military challenges in Jewish history due to the spirit of the people, rather than the failed spirit of the establishment ….” (Uniqueness and Destiny, pp 20-22, Ben Gurion, IDF Publishing, 1953).

3. Chanukah has been a universal role model of national and religious liberation struggle against all odds, the victory of principle-driven faith and liberty over convenience-driven cynicism and opportunism, tenacious optimism over pessimism.

President Obama sold his nuclear deal with Iran with promises that the accord would be based on “unprecedented verification,” and this week we were reminded of how much that promise was worth. Witness the latest report on Iran’s nuclear program from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The IAEA is the U.N. outfit that is supposed to monitor Iran’s compliance with the agreement, which requires Tehran to answer the agency’s questions on its past nuclear work in order to obtain sanctions relief. On Wednesday the agency produced its “final assessment”—the finality here having mostly to do with the U.N. nuclear watchdog giving up hope of ever getting straight answers.

Hence we learn that “Iran did not provide any clarification” regarding experiments the agency believes it conducted on testing components of nuclear components at its military facility at Parchin. “The information available to the Agency, including the results of the sampling analysis and the satellite imagery, does not support Iran’s statements on the purpose of the building,” says the report. “The Agency assesses that the extensive activities undertaken by Iran since February 2012 at the particular location of interest to the Agency seriously undermined the Agency’s ability to conduct effective verification.”

Modern human accomplishments seldom outstrip miracles of the past, but those who light the candles for Hanukkah beginning Sunday night are involved in an even greater struggle for political and religious freedom than the Maccabees in their time.

The festival commemorates the recapture and rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem almost 22 centuries ago, initiating eight decades of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. Today’s defenders of Israel fight not only for their own restored political and religious freedom but for the right of all nations to freedom from increasingly violent and maddened enemies.

Jewish political history is well represented by the emblematic legend of the oil that was required to consecrate the Temple after its defilement at the hands of the Hellenistic Seleucid rulers. Thought to be enough to last only a single day, the oil burned for the eight days needed to obtain a new supply.

The new movie Youth is a feast for the eyes, but it’s far more than that. It’s about two old men, a famous composer (played by Michael Caine) and a famous film director (Harvey Keitel) on summer vacation at a gorgeous resort in the Swiss Alps — during which they confront truths about their lives and about people and things they have lost. Yes, I am well aware that with that last sentence I have made the movie sound unspeakably boring to most readers — but stick with me for a minute: It is, in fact, the exact opposite of boring, because, for the film’s two hours, the screen is always full of life, incident, emotion, and color. One scene was notable for me because it was a solitary exception to this rule: Rachel Weisz, as Caine’s daughter, gives a speech about how Caine was an absentee father and didn’t show an interest in his family even when he was home. I can’t fault Weisz’s performance — she delivers the monologue quite convincingly – but it’s a scene that really belongs in another movie, a much talkier melodrama.

With mathematically predictable precision, President Barack Hussein Obama declared that last Wednesday’s slaughter of 17 American attendees of a Christmas party by two Muslims in a community center in California, and the wounding of two-dozen others, was a mystery (“We don’t know the motives)—and that the U.S. needed stricter gun laws. It was a jihadist attack by devout Muslims against Americans, as it happens. It was an eminently jihadist act of murderous aggression by self-starting, home-grown Muslim terrorists.
Enough already of Obama and his ilk. The war against sudden jihad self-generated by Muslim immigrants and their offspring, threatening literally every American, is by now both real and present. It can and must be won, in spite of Obama and his ilk. From now on every Muslim is a legitimate suspect and every non-Muslim is a potential victim, with self-defense strategies understood and applied.

I confess to watching some pretty cretinous TV shows. Whenever they include any politics the conservative is always shown as a lout- an oaf who offends and blusters and lies under the false umbrella of “patriotism.”

He/she will insult the courage of prominent war heroes, mock another person’s looks, incite with trumped up statistics, offend a disabled reporter with wild hand gestures and, as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler probably summed it up become “a fact checker’s dream…and nightmare. He spouts off so many ‘facts,’ often twisted or wrong, that it takes a lot of time to hack through the weeds.”

Sometimes he/she stumbles on some truth, but is so wrong on foreign policy- dealing with terrorism, North Korea, the Middle East with simplistic solutions.

I never would have thought that a candidate like that could emerge, and more incredible- I never thought that some of my friends- intelligent and politically savvy people could support a mountebank ( : a boastful unscrupulous pretender : charlatan)for the highest office…rsk