RUTHFULLY YOURS

We’ll remember this as the summer the nation went mad. Lynch mobs are usually brought to the boil by a heinous event, encouraged by heat, humidity and harangue. There was a heinous event, now all but forgotten, but this is hardly a long, hot summer. There’s a drought in Southern California but June and July have been moderate and pleasant, with considerable rain, nearly everywhere else. Nevertheless, a lynch mob with tar, feathers, rails and ropes has been on the scout for somebody to harass, hurt or hang.

Mobs are usually raised from the ranks of the poor, the wretched and the hangers-on from the refuse of the shore, as in Emma Lazarus‘ famous poem at the Statue of Liberty. But not this time. The usual masters of successful rabble-rousing, Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have taken a holiday. We can’t blame them. The usual shouters on all sides have been strangely quiet.

This time the leaders are the “respectables,” as the elites imagine themselves: know-it-all academics, the usual pundits looking for attention, rectors and reverends and other divines out to get a few lines in the public prints, governors, senators, mayors and assorted politicians in pursuit of voters with unrequited grievances.

The nuclear agreement signed by the P5 +1 nations (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, including the United States, plus Germany) and Iran is disastrous. It will provide nuclear weapons and hundreds of billions of dollars to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his radical Islamic Shia Iranian regime.

Everything in the past two years has pointed to precisely such a deal which leaves Iran with its nuclear weapons program and infrastructure intact, while additionally shredding the international sanctions regime upon Tehran and infusing its economy with hundreds of billions of dollars in unfreezing of assets and sanctions relief.

It is implied by the oath of office taken by Barak Obama that he will defend the Constitution and this country from foreign powers and from domestic enemies. But he can’t defend either the country or the Constitution if his agenda is to see both torn apart by Islam and Amnesty.

Before turning to the subject of whether or not America wants to exist or will continue to exist as a free country – “To Be, or Not to Be,” not that there’s much freedom left in it – let’s focus for a moment on the two illustrations of “The Immigration Question: Part One.”

The first illustration of the Huns invading Italy from the north is by Spanish painter Upiano Checa (1860-1916). The Huns were nomadic and as a rule did not settle anywhere or put down roots. They were not colonizers, but raiders. They existed to invade, rape, loot, destroy, plunder, collect booty and slaves, demand tribute, and to subjugate, then move on. While the Huns established an empire-of-devastation over a wide swath of Europe in the fifth century, theirs was more of an ISIS empire. They temporarily occupied whatever region they happened to invade and ravish. But the nomadic character of the Huns prevented their occupation from coalescing into a Hunnic “caliphate.” Their “empire” dissolved. Some elements of the Huns eventually settled in what is now Hungary.

I left this amended and expanded comment on a July 12th Gatestone article by Soeren Kern, “Europe’s Great Migration Crisis”:

The main problem is a civilization one. The overwhelming number of “immigrants” [or “migrants”] bring cultural and moral attitudes with them that are antithetical to a civilized existence. They will also bring old cultural habits and generations- or even ages-old animosities towards other immigrant groups with them and will continue them in whatever Western country they settle in. Witness the Sunni-Shi’ite division. They will all expect to be “taken care of” economically by their host governments, thus adding more welfare dependents to already burdened welfare systems. They will be hostile to the whole concept of the rule of law that sustains a civilized, ordered existence.

Observe the attitudes and tactics of Muslims in every European country; they expect the various European societies to conform to their religious-political norms and refuse to assimilate into the larger, indigenous society. In Britain, it’s not only the Muslims who thumb their noses at British law and culture; there are the Romany gypsies and other ethnicity-centered immigrant groups who demand a “separate but equal” status, as well, and are willing to raise hell if they aren’t granted it.

The French National Day commemorates the beginning of the French Revolution with the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. Three years later in 1793, the Reign of Terror began with the guillotine and serial public executions. The Revolutionary Tribunal executed 2,400 people in Paris by July 1794. Across France 30,000 people were killed.

While all this was going on in France in America on May 25, 1787, the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia with 55 delegates in attendance, representing all 13 states except Rhode Island, which refused to send representatives because it did not want a powerful central government . They did form a more perfect Union. Vive L’Amerique!!

Hillary Is Running on the Exact Same Economic Agenda as Obama Did in 2008

Yesterday’s speech from Hillary Clinton was supposed to unveil a new, bold economic agenda. Instead, it offered a remarkable sense of déjà vu: Just about every major policy prescription it laid out was proposed by Barack Obama in 2008.

Make no mistake, candidate Clinton pledged to offer an agenda of new ideas, not just photocopies of dusty white papers from past campaigns. “We’re not going to find all the answers we need today in the playbooks of the past,” she began. We can’t go back to the old policies that failed us before. Nor can we just replay previous successes. Today is not 1993 or 2009.” But her proposals were almost entirely from “the playbooks of the past,” nearly every one of them having been first put to the public seven years ago, or even earlier.

Yesterday Clinton proposed an “infrastructure bank that can channel more public and private funds, channel those funds to finance world-class airports, railways, roads, bridges and ports.”

In 2008, then-candidate Obama pledged to create “a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank to expand and enhance, not supplant, existing federal transportation investments.”

Yesterday Clinton urged the country, “Let’s build those faster broadband networks.”

HERE IS THE SIMPLE AND SHORT ANSWER….VOTE FOR A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT…ANYONE EXCEPT TRUMP AND RAND PAUL….RSK
Bridging the U.S.–Israel Divide On Obama’s watch, political relations have deteriorated sharply, but strategic cooperation is still going strong.
Even before it was formally published late last month, Michael Oren’s memoir of his time as Israel’s envoy to the United States had ignited a firestorm of controversy, and for very good reason. His book, Ally: My Journey across the American–Israeli Divide, provides the most damning account to date of a “special relationship” that, on President Obama’s watch, has deteriorated to an almost unthinkable degree, with the White House coming to view Israel and its often-pugnacious premier, Benjamin Netanyahu, as more of a problem than Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Palestinian corruption, or the Syrian civil war.

White House officials were quick to condemn the book and to demand that Netanyahu formally distance himself from Oren’s account. (He has refused to do so.) But there can be little doubt that Oren’s anecdotes are so striking precisely because they confirm what many people have long sensed: that all is not well between Washington and Jerusalem, and might not be for some time to come.

Look out, Grandma: Medicare said on Wednesday it wants to start paying for end-of-life counseling.

It’s being sold as “death with dignity,” but it’s more like dying for dollars. Seniors are nudged to forego life-sustaining procedures and hospital care to go into hospice. That enriches the booming hospice industry and also frees up dollars for the left’s favored social causes.

Why is the government meddling with how we cope with death? The Institute of Medicine doesn’t mince words. Scrimping on seniors will free up money “to fund highly targeted and carefully tailored social services for both children and adults.” Just like ObamaCare. Robbing Grandma to spread the wealth.

In 2009, President Obama said seniors are getting too many procedures and maybe they’re “better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.” Obama’s health guru Ezekiel Emanuel argues the elderly should be a lower priority because “they have already had more life-years.”

‘Progressive” is a funny word, one that often means the opposite of what it appears to mean. Hillary Rodham Clinton is a wanton and shameless trafficker in Nineties nostalgia, but the odd fact is that she intends to be sworn in as president in 2017 with the Democratic platform from 1948: weaponizing the tax code for use against disfavored businesses while offering rich new subsidies for compliant corporations, raising the minimum wage, aggrandizing the micromanagerial powers of the Department of Labor, expanding our already insolvent entitlements, adding mightily to our zero-return “investments” in government-school bureaucracies and dodgy energy programs, etc.

At least the Democrats of 1948 were also campaigning to repeal Taft-Hartley.

Mrs. Clinton’s accomplishments are restricted almost entirely to a series of prestigious job titles. We’d say that she’s padding her résumé, but at this point in her over-ripe career Mrs. Clinton is only padding her obituary, which is a morbid thing to do. She was an undistinguished senator holding office in a freshly adopted Democratic bastion as a craven tribute to her husband, and then she was a feckless and destructive secretary of state whose wake of incompetence spread, and spreads still, from Moscow to Tripoli. Now she seeks to attain the presidency on a series of intellectually dishonest and lightly considered economic nostrums.

They could all be confronted. But by the Obama administration?

The U.S. and its allies are faced with four major threats, and they are as diverse and yet as akin as the proverbial apocalyptic horsemen.

Vladimir Putin has a tsarist idea that he can reclaim insidiously the periphery of the old Soviet Union — Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, the Baltic states — on the principle of protecting Russian-speaking minorities in these breakaway republics. More practically, he feels that any security guarantees extended by the West to these entities are about as valid as an Obama red line or a Greek assurance of financial reform.

By Western criteria, Putin’s Russia is broke. It is shrinking and dysfunctional. But by Putin’s own metrics, his people are energized by Russia’s new defiance of the West. And if Russia is increasingly autocratic, and bifurcated into a small elite and an impoverished mass, that is nothing new, but simply the way things have always been in Russia, whether tsarist or Communist. Putin seems to assume that, if he can succeed in reestablishing the 19th-century Russian empire and bullying Eastern Europe into becoming once again a neutral buffer between Russia and the West, then he will go down in history as another Peter the Great or Joseph Stalin.