RUTHFULLY YOURS

Various and sundry nail-biters losing sleep over Michael Bay’s just released 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, worried sick that it might pose a threat to the coronation (um, election) of Hillary Clinton as president of the United States, can relax. The movie actually does a good job of covering up the criminal incompetence of the Obama administration and its then secretary of state, the aforementioned H. Clinton.

Back in the day when movies weren’t just glorified video games, it was made clear early on who the good guys were and who the bad. Westerns and crime stories pretty much followed this formula, even if the good guys weren’t always perfectly good, nor the bad guys perfectly evil. Audiences rooted for the good guys and went home happy when they won and the bad guys died of lead poisoning.

So who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in 13 Hours?

The good guys are obvious. Who are the bad guys?

The first one to put in an appearance is Libya’s former strongman, Col. Moammar Gaddafi, in power from 1969 to 2011. A grainy clip shows him being dragged away and summarily shot. Jubilation followed the tyrant’s demise, U.N.-supervised free and fair elections were held immediately, and a pro-American government was installed dedicated to keeping a lid on terrorism throughout North Africa and beyond. Another fabulous Obama administration foreign policy success! Woo-hoo!

Joseph Roth has emerged as one of the greatest, certainly the most prescient, of the German writers of the entre-deux-guerres. If Thomas Mann achieved wider renown, it was due in good part to his performance as the aloof man of letters. Writing to Stefan Zweig in 1933, Roth was typically irreverent: “I have never cared for Thomas Mann’s way of walking on water. He isn’t Goethe . . . . [He] has somehow usurped ‘objectivity’. Between you and me, he is perfectly capable of coming to an accommodation with Hitler . . . . He is one of those people who will countenance everything, under the pretext of understanding everything”.

By contrast, The Hotel Years – an anthology of Roth’s shorter journalism, collected and translated by Michael Hofmann – includes a gentle pen portrait, from 1937, of Franz Grillparzer. Composed in Parisian destitution, it demonstrates how Roth came to treasure the irretrievable civilities of the old Europe. Of the Austrian playwright’s single meeting with Goethe, he observed, “It was like a Friday going out to see what a Sunday is like and then going home, satisfied and sad that he was Friday”. In Roth’s case, exile and penury bestowed sorry radiance on the lost world of the shtetl in which the impoverished Ost- Juden had no occasion for alien affectations; unashamed thieves, smugglers, tricksters and whores nurtured no illusions, as Western Europe’s haute Juiverie did, of exemption from malice. Whether their obituarist in Weights and Measures (1937) would ever have been happy actually living among them is another matter.

Roth was the first novelist to mention Adolf Hitler’s name in print, as far back as 1923. The view from the street, if not yet the gutter, allowed him to see it all coming. The Radetsky March (1932) – named after “the Marseillaise of reaction” – is now recognized as a classic elegy for Emperor Franz Josef’s vanished supremacy. During its author’s lifetime, however, a lack of fame was always the spur. Without his prodigious facility for writing feuilletons for the liberal press, Roth would have been unable to make a living from his pen.

In case you were just enjoying the weekend with your family and not listening to the news, the world changed over the past 48 hours.

The United States has now officially become a Banana Republic.

In sweeping moves that gave the lie to repeated assertions by Secretary of State John Kerry that there would be no “comprehensive” deal with Iran, the United States on Saturday gave Iran a clean bill of nuclear health, lifted sanctions on more than 400 Iranian government entities and individuals, and swapped U.S. citizens held hostage by Iran for Iranian nationals convicted of violating U.S. export control laws.

There was so much news over the weekend that the media has had a hard time keeping up. But not your government, which has been beavering away so they could trade away our sovereignty, our legal system, and our national security interests at the stroke of a pen.

The Treasury Department has been working for months to draft a package of implementing regulations for Obama’s ill-conceived nuclear deal. The thicket of U.S. sanctions on Iran has become so dense over the years that Treasury had to post a separate web page with a guide to sanctions relief, which was split among eight separate statements.

My favorite was a list of 400 Iranian state entities now removed from U.S. sanctions. I had been tracking many of those companies for years.

From the opening image of Spike Lee’s new movie Chi-Raq – a red, white, and blue map of the United States composed entirely of the silhouettes of a variety of guns – it is clear that the filmmaker intends to take on the volatile issue of blacks and gun violence in war-torn Chicago, nicknamed Chi-Raq by its black inhabitants after the Middle Eastern war zone. Lee has a habit of provoking racial controversy, and that is no less true of this darkly humorous satire (“not a comedy,” he insists) set in the murder capital of the United States. True to the director’s form, Chi-Raq provokes and dissatisfies those on both sides of the debate.

Spike Lee has attacked both white and black fellow filmmakers in the past for reasons related to race. As noted in his profile at the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks resource site, Lee excoriated Tyler Perry for the stereotyped depictions of black characters in his hugely popular comedies, and Woody Allen for not featuring enough black characters in his movies set in Manhattan. From his perspective that racism is deeply entrenched in American culture, the enormously wealthy Lee has railed against such issues as interracial couples, Charlton Heston and the NRA, NASCAR, the war in Iraq, the shooting of Michael Brown, and the gentrification of New York. He suspects the government of having engineered the AIDS epidemic and the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He has supported Barack Obama and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. He has stated that blacks can’t be racist, because they don’t have the political power to impose racism.

But interestingly, Chi-Raq doesn’t take an entirely expected position about blacks and gun violence. Lee could have made a movie about a white cop shooting an unarmed black man, which is the supposed epidemic ravaging the black American community; instead, he made a film that lays the responsibility for the high rate of black deaths annually from gun violence largely on the black community itself. Unlike the Black Lives Matter movement, Lee is willing to face the harsh reality of young black males perpetrating violence against other blacks.

Patricia Smith and Charles Woods, parents of two of the Benghazi dead, Sean Smith and Tyrone Woods, would disagree with the notion that history is a lie agreed upon. They do not agree with and do not consent to Hillary Clinton’s attempted rewriting of history and the attempted hiding of what is arguably her criminal negligence in what she calls the “fog of war.”

Family members of the Benghazi dead talked to Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly Wednesday night after viewing the world premier of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Charles Woods and Jeremiah Woods, father and brother of Ty Woods, and Patricia Smith. mother of Sean, repeated their consistent statements that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Obama, and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice all told them in front of their son’s caskets that Benghazi was the fault of a video and they would get, not the terrorist’s that killed their sons, but the filmmaker. As Matthew K. Burke notes on the Politistick blog:

The most powerful moment of the interviews — setting aside Charles Woods, whose son Ty Woods was killed in the Islamic attacks, who showed notes he took at the funerals of the victims which collaborate [sic] that Hillary Clinton told the families the known lie that the YouTube video was responsible, was a crying Pat Smith, who sadly declared the one thing she would like to say.

The poor lady couldn’t even make it through the whole movie, having to leave immediately upon seeing the actor portraying her son.

Almost like Bill Clinton’s multiple victims of his sexual assault victims who were labeled as liars, Hillary Clinton claimed to not have told the families that the YouTube video was responsible — in essence calling the families liars.

The more naïve members of the Hillary Clinton campaign have long dreaded the release of Michael Bay’s factual account of the Benghazi attack, 13 Hours. The more sophisticated members of that campaign were less worried. They were confident their friends in the media would scare off all but the most deluded “tea-baggers.”

Yes, the media will try. They are trying. I am not sure, however, that they will succeed. In the age of social media, word of mouth is much more significant a force than it ever was before. And the word of mouth on 13 Hours will be justifiably powerful. The movie is riveting from beginning to end.

I saw the movie without benefit of having read a review. I was further burdened by the fact that I know the story well; I have written extensively about Benghazi. When the movie begins with the words on screen, “This is a true story,” and not the usual “This is based on a true story,” I was prepared to hold the filmmakers to account. They were as good as their word.

In reading the reviews afterward, I sensed some relief among the critics that the movie was not overtly political. The names of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, for instance, go unmentioned. In a feint at sophistication, some critics held this against director Bay.

WASHINGTON—Two months ago, Houston lawyer Joel Androphy got a call from an Iranian official in Washington requesting a meeting. They met a few days later at a federal detention center in Houston with Mr. Androphy’s client, Bahram Mechanic, a 69-year-old Iranian-American facing charges for shipping electronics equipment to Iran.

The Iranian official asked if Mr. Mechanic would be interested in being part of a clemency exchange between the two countries, a sentiment U.S. officials soon echoed. It remained unclear if the deal would come together until about a week ago.

“Everybody told me to keep my mouth shut, both the U.S. and the Iranians,” Mr. Androphy said in a phone interview from the detention center on Saturday as he waited for Mr. Mechanic to be released.

The U.S. and Iran consummated a historic—though controversial—legal deal Saturday that freed several Iranian-Americans facing charges in Iran and offered clemency to six Iranian-Americans and one Iranian either facing charges or convicted of charges in the U.S.

The lifting of the sanctions on Iran is significant not only because it rewards the regime with $150 billion, allowing to increase its global terrorist activities. It is significant because it marks President Obama’s success in remaking the United States into an indistinguishable country.

Choosing to ‘lead from behind’ and apologizing as U.S. major foreign policy tools, all but ensured the U.S. lost its power. His ‘turning the other cheek’ to provocations from Iran, China, North Korea and Russia, has done little to stop them from pursuing their violent agendas. Instead of making the Middle East into a safer place, as Secretary Kerry announced on Saturday, Obama has turned the region and the world into a much more dangerous place.

To detract attention, the Treasury Department announced on Sunday “it was sanctioning a eleven companies and individuals “for procuring items of Iran’s missile program.” The White House noted, “US statutory sanctions focused on Iran’s support for terrorism, human rights abuses, and missile activities will remain in effect and continue to be enforced.”

However, these new sanctions are meaningless because they apply only in the U.S. and only on U.S. companies, leaving European and other nations free to trade with whoever they like in Iran.The lifting of sanctions on the terrorist Islamic Theocracy of Iran has all but legitimized the funding of terrorism and turned the United States into its major funder.

The ITIC’s Spotlight on Iran highlighted the growing Crisis in Relations between Iran and the Arab States, as well as its intervention in the region. With $150 billion in its coffers, expect Iran to redouble its global influence and terrorist activities, as well as intervention in the region.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/6370/fullUtopias of abandoning the past and embracing a very different future have generally been the quickest route to dystopias of destruction, callousness and ignorance — not that that prevented New Labour from parroting the idea.

These two new editions of works first published in 1997 and 1985 respectively underline the duality of deep histories that structure and mould the present age and of the impact of current perceptions, concerns and assumptions in the reading of the past. This duality is scarcely new. Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599) tells us as much about an England under threat from Spain, the world-empire, and defining a new nationalism as about the pursuit of French territory by an early 15th-century ruler. The same is true of 20th-century portrayals of the monarch.

This transience makes any attempt to fix the past problematic. In particular, the element of transience ensures that books that the blurb-writers proclaim as definitive are anything but, and also means that the panoply of authority and reference in the shape of encyclopedias, historical dictionaries, historical atlases, companion guides and so on, is more fragile than it appears. And so with the Oxford Companion. The first edition reflected John Cannon’s particular version of left-of-centre politics, and the new edition, while cautious of partisanship, is not too different. It certainly shows the difficulties of prediction. The UKIP entry ends: “The expectation remained that the party could split the Conservative vote at the 2015 general election.” Ed Miliband is still leader of Labour, indeed “relatively secure in the post”. There is also a fair amount of uncritical praise. For example, the entry on the Olympics in Britain, which in practice is only on the 2012 Olympics, ignores the extent to which the Games did not promote exercise as anticipated. Yet, the piece on the welfare state correctly discerns concern over costs, dependency and affordability.

The book is presented as “the essential authoritative reference book on over 2,000 years of British history”. It is not of course that. In particular, there is too little on the local and the regional, on the places and spaces that are so significant to senses of identity and to the experience of the wider developments discussed. On the plus side, the writing is generally precise and concise, the level of detail good, and there is room for some of the more unusual episodes of national life.

A Modest Proposal to Buttress the Constitution, Restore Confidence in Government and Promote Domestic Tranquility By Rael Jean Isaac

Nothing is more melancholy than to see the level of contempt directed at one of the three key institutions of government established by our Constitution. A Rasmussen poll in December 2015 found only 9% of likely voters thought Congress was doing a good or excellent job-down from 56% in 2001. Strikingly, Republicans and Democrats are in agreement on these miserable approval ratings. Contrast this with the public’s approval level of the President and the Supreme Court: 46% rate Obama’s job performance favorably and 36% think the Supreme Court is doing a good or excellent job (both also according to 2015 Rasmussen polls). To be sure, these approval ratings are nothing to boast about, but even the Supreme Court is four times as well-regarded as Congress.

There is only one surefire step that can buttress the Constitution and restore public confidence in our institutions. Abolish Congress. Admittedly it is counter-intuitive to argue that we strengthen our Constitution by abolishing one of its crucial provisions. But hear me out. It is undisputed that, to quote Dr. Joseph Postell, writing for the Heritage Foundation, “over the past 100 years our government has been transformed from a limited, constitutional, federal republic to a centralized administrative state that for the most part exists outside the structure of the Constitution and wields nearly unlimited power.” This bureaucratic web of agencies and departments is frequently referred to as a “fourth branch” of government. By eliminating Congress we will in fact be returning to the vision of the founders, restoring a three part system of governance.