RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tell us something we don’t know, Mr. President. We could have guessed as much by the puny air campaign more worthy of the Grand Duchy of Fenwick in The Mouse That Roared than by what was once the world’s only superpower. We wouldn’t be mounting any air campaign at all, had not the radical Islamists of the “JV team” Islamic State had not cut off the heads of two American journalists, Steven Sotloff and James Foley.

Our delusional commander-in-chief, who still believes the massacre at Ft. Hood by jihadist Nidal Hasan is a case of “workplace violence” and that the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris was a case of random violence and of victims being in the wrong place at the wrong time, pathetically proclaimed at the G-20 Conference in Antalaya, Turkey, as the Federalist reports:

“What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with that has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people and to protect the people in the region who are getting killed and to protect our allies and people like France,” Obama said. “I’m too busy for that.”

Too busy, the same as you were too busy resting up for a Las Vegas fundraiser the night Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, and Sean Smith were murdered by a terrorist attack in Benghazi, an attack you and you’re Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, told the parents of the deal was caused by a video?

In 14 years of continual combat, has there ever been a greater disconnect between our warrior class and the civilians who purport to lead them? American politicians still don’t understand our enemy, still don’t understand the capabilities and limitations of the American military, and — worst of all — they still seem unwilling to learn. They come from an intellectual aristocracy that believes itself educated simply because it’s credentialed — and they tend to listen only to those who share similar credentials. They’ve built a bubble of impenetrable ignorance, and they govern accordingly.

During World War I, German general Max Hoffman reportedly declared that “English soldiers fight like lions, but we know they are lions led by donkeys.” Over time, his criticism stuck, and popular opinion about the war hardened into a consensus that the horrors of the trenches were the product of stupidity and lack of imagination. Callous generals, the criticism held, safely ensconced themselves in the rear while sending young men to die in futile charges, unable to conceive of the tactical and strategic changes necessary to deal with the technological revolutions that defined the war. This criticism was unfair then — generals on all sides suffered high casualty rates and dramatically changed tactics during the course of World War I — but it’s entirely fair now.

Just look at the collection of senior “talent “advising President Obama on ISIS. Stanford- and Oxford-educated National Security Advisor Susan Rice has no military experience, was part of the team that disastrously botched America’s response to the Rwandan genocide, and is notable mainly for a willingness to say anything to advance the electoral prospects of her political bosses.

His imagining of an Islamic France is no simple provocation. Rather, this deep, gripping and haunting novel is a recent high-point for European fiction. No current writer gets anywhere near Houellebecq’s achievement in finding a fictional way into the darkest and most necessary corners of our time

Submission
by Michel Houellebecq
William Heinemann, 2015, 256 pages, $32.99
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Michel Houellebecq is a genius. He is also a nihilist. And not the fashionable type of American nihilist (“nihilism with a happy ending”, as Allan Bloom once called it), but a connoisseur and practitioner of the fullest-blown fin de millénaire French nihilism. For Houellebecq and his main characters life is a solitary and pointless labour, devoid of interest, joy or comfort aside from the occasional—generally paid-for—blow-job.
The fact that the poet of such an existence can have been celebrated by his peers (Houellebecq has been awarded the Prix Goncourt, among other prizes) is perhaps less surprising than the fact that such a writer has proved so popular. For almost two decades his books have been best-sellers in their original French and in translation. When books sell this well—especially when they are also quality, rather than pap, literature—it is because they must speak to something of our times. It may be an extreme version of our present existence, but even the unarguably bracing nature of the nihilism would not be sufficient as an attraction without at least a disgusted flicker of self-recognition from his readers.

The nation’s media, who seem to assume that Americans are weary of war, rather than that they are desperately frustrated at being infantilized and lied to, rarely discuss what defense programs need more investment. If anything, they discuss what defense programs should be killed.

Defense spending grew from $265 billion in 1996 to $300 billion in 2000, a 13% increase, equivalent to a $76 billion annual increase today. And the plan to balance the budget reached its goal in 1997. Why can America not do that again? Reform tax policy. Restore a sound defense budget plan.

“You think defending this nation is expensive; try not defending it.” — Senator Ted Cruz, Nov. 10, 2015

Especially as ISIS, Iran and others openly threaten the United States, it seems increasingly urgent for this administration and the next to determine the level of defense spending America should support.

A new study by the American Enterprise Institute, (AEI), authored primarily by defense experts Tom Donnelly and Mackenzie Eaglen initially supports using as a minimum baseline the defense five year plan proposed in 2012, by then Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.

By the end of the new film “Trumbo,” there is the feeling that restitution has been made to the blacklisted writer whose career was relegated to writing scripts signed by noms de plume, or more appropriately, noms de guerre. Trumbo’s name appears triumphantly as the screenwriter of “Spartacus” and “Exodus” and Hollywood and the world know that it is his craftsmanship that won the two previous Oscars for “Roman Holiday” and “The Brave Bull.” Though we see the toll that the blacklist has taken on the lives of many people in the industry, we also see that the “evil forces” of HUAC and the anti-communist witch-hunters of the private sector have been defeated and freedom of speech and the sanctity of individual rights have triumphed.

This movie was released during the same week as the protests at the University of Missouri resulted in the resignation of the president, the chancellor and the football coach. Their crimes were far less egregious than govt subpoenas to self-incriminate and name other names. At Missouri and other colleges across the country, we are now dealing with issues of micro-aggression, insensitivity, hurt feelings and the black student demand for higher black faculty quotas. One student complained about the discrimination she felt when her roommate asked questions regarding her hairstyle and what products she used. The issue of Halloween costurmes such as Mexican sombreros and ponchos received the attention of Yale administrators who cautioned students to be mindful of ethnic sensibilities. A professor’s article calling for more levity and free expression for this holiday was met with calls for her dismissal. These newly heightened sensibilities have been responsible for craven administrative cancellations of speakers on campus or total disruption of the event if an undesirable speaker shows up.

President Obama on Sunday promised to “redouble” U.S. efforts against Islamic State, which shows he isn’t deaf to the political impact of Friday’s murderous assault in Paris. But why should anyone believe him? After years of dismissing the rising terror threat, Mr. Obama needs an epiphany if he doesn’t want to be remembered as the President who allowed radical Islam to spread and prosper.

“It is an act of war that was waged by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, by Daesh [the Arab name for Islamic State], against France,” said French President François Hollande on Saturday, in words that met the moment. Contrast that to Mr. Obama, who on Friday morning told ABC News that “we have contained” Islamic State. Some are saying Mr. Obama is guilty of bad timing, but the truth is worse: The remark is what he believes, or at least what he has wanted Americans to believe.

Watching the pundits turn themselves into human pretzels to avoid blaming Muslims for the atrocities in Paris is as funny as watching Inspector Clouzot looking for a perpetrator in a priceless Bechstein grand piano. The words “alleged” or “reportedly” are their permanent fig leaf….as in it is alleged, that the terrorists shouted “allahu akbar” which is just a term for “god is great”-or”reportedly” this was another “jihad.”

Who are the members of Al-Shabbab, Boko Haram, Abu-Sayef, Hamas, Hezbollah….and all the other “alienated and frustrated and poor youths” who wreak havoc throughout the globe? A teeny, tiny microscopic minority of badies who have hijacked “the Religion of Peace.” rsk

A graphic that appeared in the summer 2015 issue of al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine

“House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said “we do not yet know what specific group is responsible, but their strategy of attacking soft targets, spreading terror and uncertainty, and using the fear they create to further radicalize and recruit is one we will have to get much better at confronting.”

Congressional leaders said Friday night that it still wasn’t clear which terrorist group was responsible for coordinated terror attacks that killed more than 150 people.

Al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula was behind the January attacks in the city on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a grocery store. The terror group talked about their operation in the summer issue of Inspire magazine and threatened new attacks on France, “the party of Satan.”

“It is France that has shared all of America’s crimes. It is France that has committed crimes in Mali and the Islamic Maghreb. It is France that supports the annihilation of Muslims in Central Africa in the name of race cleansing,” said the magazine. “They are the party of Satan, the enemies of Allah the Almighty and the enemies of His Prophets – peace be upon them.”

‘These filthy money matters are the curse of my life and my only worry,” the 24-year-old Winston Churchill complained to his mother in 1898. Money troubles dogged Churchill throughout his life, as David Lough reveals in “No More Champagne,” his fascinating study of Churchill’s finances. On several occasions, the author shows, Churchill was “bailed out” by friends with gifts or loans when his debts threatened to push him into bankruptcy.

A month after becoming prime minister in 1940, Churchill ran out of money to pay his household bills, his taxes and the interest on his large overdraft. His personal assistant, Brendan Bracken, approached Sir Henry Strakosch, an Austrian-born banker who supported Churchill’s anti-Nazi stance. Strakosch promptly wrote out a check for £5,000, which the author estimates to be equivalent to $250,000 today. (Each page includes a helpful multiplier for calculating the rough modern equivalent of financial figures quoted in the book.) “The amount reached Churchill’s account on 21 June,” Mr. Lough writes. “Thus fortified, he paid a clutch of overdue bills from shirt-makers, watch-repairers and wine merchants before he turned his attention back to the war.”
No More Champagne

By David Lough
Picador, 532 pages, $32

Strakosch had also had to rescue him two years before, in the same week Hitler’s troops marched into Austria and Churchill gave an impassioned speech to Parliament warning that Britain “would soon have to choose between resisting Hitler’s campaign of aggression or submitting to it.” On that occasion, Mr. Lough reveals, Strakosch bought Churchill’s entire portfolio of shares, which had been plunging in value, at their original price of £18,000 (equivalent to $1.2 million today), even though their value had fallen precipitously in the market’s panic at the impending war. He never asked for the money back.