RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you asked me what it is that makes America respected around the world, I might come up with a short list like this one off the top of my head:

1. Your living standards. The real test of your popularity is the length of the queue to get into your country as compared to the queue of those trying to get out. There’s a reason Mexican border guards aren’t patrolling their frontier against gringo illegals.

2. Your television and popular culture. Pretty much the whole world watches “The Simpsons,” “Breaking Bad” and the rest. This evinces some level of global ease with American values.

3. Your enterprise. I remember an Islamist once saying “We want your television sets, not your television programs”. He couldn’t see why the two things came as a package.

4. Your freedom. There is nowhere else on the planet where people can so confidently expect to be unharassed by the authorities.

5. Two world wars. After defeating the Kaiser, America sponsored the creation of several new nation-states from no other motive than altruism. After defeating the Axis, it went further, rebuilding and reforming the countries it had beaten. Look at modern Germany and Japan. I’d say they represent two pretty massive American achievements.

6. The Cold War, by which you liberated hundreds of millions of people from Communism, which must be considered mathematically the most murderous ideology in human history.

Alzheimer’s disease affects 5.3 million Americans and is this country’s sixth most deadly disease. It has existed for thousands of years and confounded scientists for more than a century. But that doesn’t stop the dreamers from dreaming. Last week an Ivy League-educated friend shared some big news. “Have you heard?” he asked: Marijuana might stop Alzheimer’s.

While neuroscientists, geneticists and biochemists have mapped out the disease’s multi-causal nature and its immensely complex genetic-environmental interaction, the public seems determined to find an easy out.

This wishing isn’t new. Thirty years ago the world quickly latched onto the false hope that aluminum in antiperspirant and cookware was the culprit behind Alzheimer’s. Then came the cinnamon cure, the cayenne-pepper cure, the coconut-oil cure. The latest street buzz is to say “yes” to marijuana and “no” to gluten and carbs.

Progressivism is the fear that someone, somewhere might be making a profit.

Did Bill de Blasio hear the cock crow Sunday?

There was a day Hillary Clinton counted Mr. de Blasio among her most ardent disciples. Back in 2000, long before he was elected mayor, he even managed her successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Now he’s busy denying Mrs. Clinton his support in the most humiliating way he can: on national television. He did it this past weekend on CBS ’s “Face the Nation,” when he confirmed he’s still waiting to hear her plans for addressing income inequality. In May he did it on “Morning Joe.” Back in April he did it on NBC’s “Meet the Press”—hours before Mrs. Clinton officially launched her campaign.

In between the mayor has also made campaign-like stops in Iowa and Wisconsin, released a 13-point “Progressive Agenda” for the nation and co-written (with Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren) a Washington Post op-ed on how to “revive the American Dream.” In all but name, Mr. de Blasio is making his own run for the White House.

In 2012 it was the IRS. This election watch the Justice Department.

You won’t read much about it in the Beltway press corps, but a behind-the-scenes effort is under way to lobby the Federal Election Commission and Justice Department to stifle free political speech the way the Internal Revenue Service did in 2012. Don’t be surprised if the subpoenas hit Republican candidates at crucial political moments.

In late May the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 asked the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Right to Rise Super PAC for violating campaign-finance law. According to the letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, “If Bush is raising and spending money as a candidate, he is a candidate under the law, whether or not he declares himself to be one.”

Last summer’s Ferguson, Missouri, disturbances revealed that while blacks were 67 percent of its population, only three members of its 53-officer police force were black. Some might conclude that such a statistic is evidence of hiring discrimination. That’s a possibility, but we might ask what percentage of blacks met hiring qualifications on the civil service examination. Are there hundreds of blacks in Ferguson and elsewhere who achieve passing scores on civil service examinations who are then refused employment? There is no evidence suggesting an affirmative answer to that question.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, nationally, most black 12th-graders’ test scores are either basic or below basic in reading, writing, math and science. “Below basic” is the score received when a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his grade level. “Basic” indicates only partial mastery. Put another way, the average black 12th-grader has the academic achievement level of the average white seventh- or eighth-grader. In some cities, there’s even a larger achievement gap.

“I worry that over the course of several administrations but certainly this administration, the stiff arm that is being given to the media, that has been given to the public has become excessive. In this administration there were more than 550,000 times that the administration has claimed some sort of exemption and not let that information out,” he said at a National Journal event focused on Chaffetz’s chairmanship.

“In fact, less than 30 percent of the time that somebody submits a FOIA request do they actually get information back, a full and complete accounting of what they asked for, less than 30 percent. That’s just not who were are as a people.”

Chaffetz said the U.S. differs from every other country in the world by being open and transparent.

History is not static and it does not progress linearly. There was more free speech and unimpeded expression in 5th-century Athens than in Western Europe between 1934-45, or in Eastern Europe during 1946-1989. An American could speak his mind more freely in 1970 than now. Many in the United States had naively believed that the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution, and over two centuries of American customs and traditions had guaranteed that Americans could always take for granted free speech and unfettered inquiry.

That is an ahistorical assumption. The wish to silence, censor, and impede thought is just as strong a human emotion as the desire for free expression — especially when censorship is cloaked in rhetoric about fairness, equality, justice, and all the other euphemisms for not allowing the free promulgation of ideas.

Whenever Islamists lose elections, it is to be celebrated. In that spirit, we should celebrate Turkey’s national election, in which (as Jim, John, Jay, and Pat note) the AKP — the “Justice and Development Party” run by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — lost the parliamentary grip it has held since 2002. However, this is at most a necessary first step in what would have to be a long campaign if Turkey is to beat back the Islamist ascendancy that has gutted its democracy.

Erdoğan’s Turkey was my “Exhibit A” in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (2012). The former prime minister, now Turkey’s president, is a sharia supremacist in the mold of the Muslim Brotherhood with which he makes common cause. Erdoğan’s paeans to “democracy” made Western government officials swoon — particularly in the Bush administration, and even more so in Obama’s. But Erdoğan has never been an adherent of real democracy, as in a culture of governance that promotes liberty and minority rights.

In the question-and-answer segment of a press conference on Monday following the G7 Summit in Germany, President Obama admitted that the United States doesn’t have “a complete strategy” to combat the growing threat posed by Islamic State fighters in Iraq.

While Obama kept jobs and economic growth at the forefront of his speech, reporters quickly changed the subject once the president opened the floor for questions, pressing him on the fight against ISIS.

Bloomberg Business White House reporter Justin Sink asked the president, “You said yesterday ahead of your meeting with Prime Minister Cameron that you assessed what was working and what wasn’t. So I’m wondering, bluntly, what is not working in the fight against the Islamic state?”

In his response, Obama talked at length about the need to step up the training of Iraqi security forces, before admitting that America lacked a “complete strategy” for defeating ISIS, which he blamed partly on the Iraqi government.

Every time Hillary Clinton makes a left-wing policy pronouncement, it is, in effect, another eulogy marking the death of the coalition and style of politics that twice made her husband president.

Bill Clinton got elected by peeling off working-class whites and suburbanites from the Republican party, while holding traditional Democratic voters. He made significant geographic inroads, winning a handful of southern states both in 1992 and in his 1996 reelection, when he narrowly won the popular vote in the region as a whole.

This is all very interesting, but we might as well be talking about Grover Cleveland’s path to the presidency in 1884. The Clinton coalition is rusty and up on blocks in some overgrown backyard like the El Camino pickup he once boasted about. And Hillary knows it.