RUTHFULLY YOURS

You must understand: President Obama is accustomed to kid-glove treatment from most of the media most of the time. So when he was asked repeatedly at a Monday news conference in Turkey why he continues to insist that he never underestimated Islamic State (ISIS), and that his strategy against the terrorist outfit is working, it follows that he would become a little touchy.

“So, this is another variation on the same question,” snapped Mr. Obama at one point. “And I guess—let me try it one last time.”

His additional explanation failed, of course, not because he’s a poor communicator but because he is attempting to push a political narrative so spectacularly at odds with recent events. Inside of a month, ISIS, which already controls territory in Iraq and Syria, has claimed responsibility for crashing a Russian jetliner, along with bombings in Beirut and now the massacre in Paris. ISIS is targeting police officers, soldiers, concertgoers and soccer spectators. U.S. allies are nervous and the American public is afraid, yet Mr. Obama insisted that “we have the right strategy and we’re going to see it through.”

Claremont McKenna College was once deliberately out of step with academic fashion. I used to tell prospective students and their parents, liberal or conservative, that one of the best things about CMC was that it refused to enforce the little catechism of political correctness. Regardless of political beliefs on campus, I assured them, students did not have to worry about speaking up in class or being persecuted for their opinions.

That is now very much in doubt. Last week the turmoil stirred at Yale and the University of Missouri swept my campus. A coalition of self-proclaimed “marginalized” students presented a catalog of “microaggressions” they had suffered, demanding new forms of “institutional support” in compensation. Demonstrators, who included both CMC undergrads and a few unfamiliar, skulking adults, denounced the dean of students and humiliated her in an open-air trial. Two students went on a hunger strike. Within days, Claremont McKenna—a place I have been proud to call my employer for more than three decades—surrendered ignominiously. How and why did it happen?

Founded in 1946 in a quiet town about 30 miles east of Los Angeles, Claremont McKenna College set out to make sense of a world shattered by depression, war and totalitarianism. The first classes consisted almost entirely of demobilized GIs from World War II, who found familiar the Quonset hut classrooms then in use. The school focused its curriculum on politics and economics, with a healthy skepticism about the latest New Deal-style nostrums and a high regard for the lessons of America’s constitutional experience.

Our so called Western allies are impotent . We danced with Russia to defeat the Nazis and we won…uber morality comes at a serious price….rsk
Three days after coordinated terror attacks in Paris killed at least 129 people and put the lie to President Obama’s recent claim that Islamic State was “contained,” Mr. Obama took to the podium on Monday. Speaking from Antalya, Turkey, where he was attending a G-20 meeting, he threw the full weight of his rhetoric behind solidarity with France and behind the French military response against Islamic State, or ISIS. But he offered no policy changes. In other words, once again America is leading from behind.

Mr. Obama’s remarks in Turkey came after he sat down for an impromptu discussion with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who has shipped troops and military hardware to Syria to prop up the Bashar Assad regime and to produce desperately needed new war propaganda back home. A suggestion gaining currency in recent days—encouraged by the Putin-Obama photo op—that the U.S. and NATO cooperate with Mr. Putin against ISIS is ludicrous on many levels. The most obvious one being that Russian forces aren’t in Syria to fight ISIS.

Even after the death of 224 people—most of them Russian tourists—in the Oct. 31 Metrojet crash in Egypt that was almost certainly an ISIS terror bombing, Mr. Putin remains focused on his goals. He is in Syria to help Iran and Mr. Assad destroy any legitimate alternatives to the status quo. What is that status quo? The Assad regime and its Iranian backers controlling the region by force.

In his press conference in Turkey on Monday, President Obama called “shameful” the proposals to give special treatment to Christian refugees from the Middle East. Here’s some of what he said:

The people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism, they are the most vulnerable as a consequence of civil war and strife. They are parents, they are children, they are orphans. And it is very important — and I was glad to see that this was affirmed again and again by the G20 — that we do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism….And the United States has to step up and do its part. And when I hear folks say that, well, maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims; when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefitted from protection when they were fleeing political persecution — that’s shameful. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.

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.