RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jeb Bush tangled himself up recently when he tried to answer a dumb question on the intelligence failures about Iraq’s WMDs and their role in going to war with Saddam Hussein in 2003. I’m not interested in the media’s usual pointless chatter about the incident, or in the other Republican hopefuls who circled to plunge a spear in Jeb like the Greeks jabbing the dead Hector. More troubling is the continuing dumbing down of the context and circumstances that surrounded the decision to go to war.

Start first with the mood of the country in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. After the shock and grief came the recriminations about the government’s failure to “connect the dots” and anticipate an attack that al Qaeda had telegraphed in word and bloody deed for nearly a decade. And that destruction had been wrought by a mere 19 terrorists, who armed only with box cutters had killed 3000 and injured 6000 Americans, and cost the economy $2 trillion, according to one estimate. No one wanted to find out what havoc terrorists armed with WMDs could wreak.

It is famously said the great 13th century philosopher Thomas Aquinas baptized Aristotle by reexamining faith’s relationship to reason; likewise it’s fair to say the “Liberation Theologists” ordained, elevated, beatified, and finally deified Karl Marx by asserting (Roman Catholic) Christianity can only be understood by interpreting faith through the suffering of the poor, their struggle, and their hopes. First described in A Theology of Liberation [1] by Peruvian Priest Gustavo Gutiérrez [2], liberation theology’s message that truth, justice — and thus the true vision of the Catholic Church — can only be seen through the eyes of the poor was immediately understood by the Left as a break in the Church’s historic sense of right and wrong, good and evil. It was also a perfect vehicle for persuading the increasingly secular western elites, bored with the burdens of traditional faith, that voting for a particular party was tantamount to praying; it even took care of the obligation to “aid the poor,” and freed them of “all that mumbo-jumbo superstition of which we smart young moderns have no need.” The doctrine spread quickly throughout Latin America and its open door to cafeteria religiosity quickly found friends in Asia, Africa — and, of course, Arab Palestine, where moral relativism is a constitutional necessity.

Anonymous Israeli “military officials” have been handing out warnings that Hezbollah is turning southern Lebanon into a giant human shield for Hezbollah’s next war with Israel. These officials say that, while Israel will try to minimize civilian casualties, it can’t promise anything and can’t roll over and play dead before a barrage of Hezbollah missiles.

A New York Times report [1] indicates that these officials particularly targeted the Gray Lady with information. Other reports, such as this one from Agence France-Presse [2], tell of a more general briefing for foreign journalists at the Israeli Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.

The Times report tells of a tiny southern Lebanese Shiite village, Muhaybib, where the Israeli military sees, “nine arms depots, five rocket-launching sites, four infantry positions, signs of three underground tunnels, three antitank positions and, in the very center of the village, a Hezbollah [3] command post.”

In 2014, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain published a report on the iERA. The report concluded that the iERA should be classified as a “hate group.”

Unfortunately, providing extremists with a platform only serves to legitimize “anti-racism” and interfaith initiatives that openly promote illiberal and anti-democratic agendas.

If anti-racism activists and representatives of the Anne Frank Trust choose to attend the iERA’s event and share a platform with Abdurraheem Green, they will simply be handing a powerful cover of undeserved legitimacy to one of Britain’s most intolerant groups.

On May 21, a representative of a prominent British Jewish charity, the Anne Frank Trust, will share a platform with one of Britain’s most notorious anti-Semitic extremists: the Salafist preacher, Abdurraheem Green.

The event, organized by the Islamic Diversity Centre, is named “Against Racism Against Hatred: Tackling Anti-Semitism & Islamophobia.”

“Britain has taken leave from the world stage in an extraordinary and depressing way. It’s marginalized itself in Europe, and it’s absented itself from most of the great issues on the world stage.” — Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European Studies, Oxford University.

Ten years ago, Britain was still playing a major role in Iraq and Afghanistan, but today, Britain has ceased to be a global leader. It seems even to have lost its ambition to be one.

Britain has a long international tradition. Breaking with this tradition would be an irreparable loss.

It’s been a troubling semester, but not because many of my students passively and/or actively resist the knowledge that I try to pass on to them. It’s been frustrating not merely because government regulations and mandates have made me into a secretary filling out a myriad of online forms. It’s been disheartening not only because leftist propaganda surrounds me and I am but one small voice in the academic desert trying to teach true American core values.

No, it’s been a sad and sometimes heartbreaking semester because many college students’ assorted troubles are related to the fact that they are bereft of wholesome father figures. The combination of resentment, hurt, anger, and defiant pride run through their writings. It affects everything they do, from having trust issues with the opposite sex to taking direction from anyone they view as an authority figure. Most carry an enormous chip on their shoulders and take offense at the slightest thing.

How Taxing Organic Products Could Solve California’s Water Shortage
— Terry L. Anderson is the William A. Dunn Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center and the John and Jean DeNault Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Henry I. Miller is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy & Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.

California is in the fourth year of record-setting dearth of rain, with virtually the entire state experiencing “exceptional drought.” In response, Governor Jerry Brown has mandated a 25 percent reduction in the state’s water use — a mandate that is long on directives and short on incentives. The governor proposes to reduce acreage in lawns, prohibit new homes from irrigating with potable water, and offer rebates for replacing old toilets. Nowhere to be found are increases in water prices to induce conservation.

We have a better idea.

One of the few things economists can agree on is that increasing the price of a good will decrease the quantity demanded. For this reason, virtually every policy wonk who worries about global warming agrees that pricing carbon with a revenue-neutral carbon tax is a way to get us out of our cars and onto our bikes. Similarly, water-policy analysts agree that California’s thirst for water won’t be significantly reduced until consumers are faced with a more realistic price for the “clear gold.”

In that spirit, we propose a revenue-neutral tax on all organic products — food, linens, clothing, pillows, tobacco, etc.

How will taxing organic products help to conserve water? The answer is that organic agriculture uses more of critical inputs — labor, land, and water — than conventional agriculture. Taxation would reduce the demand for water-wasting organic products relative to non-organic alternatives, and thereby reduce some of the pressure on California’s dwindling water supplies.

Applicable precedent clearly shows that the president is going way beyond his constitutionally limited powers.
With the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals soon to decide on whether to keep the freeze on President Obama’s new and expanded amnesty programs, the Immigration Reform Law Institute — along with The Remembrance Project, The Federation for American Immigration Reform, and The National Sheriffs’ Association — has filed a friend-of-the-court brief outlining some of the weakest and most misleading legal arguments made by the Department of Justice. New research shows that the programs are even more in conflict with legal precedent and even farther outside the president’s constitutional powers than previously thought.

If George Stephanopoulos had simply donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation while also serving as one of its favorite media panelists, the controversy over his conflicts of interest would be much less. Stephanopoulos would be guilty of a clear error, but he also would have had a lot of media company.

What makes his scandal different is that he himself chose to interrogate Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, the new exposé on the Clinton Foundation. If you watch the interview, it’s pretty obvious that Stephanopoulos is playing prosecuting attorney against Schweizer while also declining to ask key questions, for instance, about Hugh Rodham, Hillary Clinton’s brother and his highly questionable dealings involving the foundation. In an op-ed today in USA Today, Schweizer says he views himself as a victim of “hidden hand journalism” in which his work was undermined without the audience’s knowing the interviewer’s biases.

That is no doubt one reason that Carole Simpson, a former colleague of Stephanopoulos’s at ABC News, decided to drop a bomb on him today on Reliable Sources, CNN’s media-criticism show. “There is a coziness that George cannot escape,” Simpson explained. “While he did try to separate himself from his political background to become a journalist, he really isn’t a journalist. . . . And I am sorry that again the public trust in the media is being challenged and frayed because of the actions of some of the top people in the business.”

What to think about George Stephanopoulos?

Some years ago, I worked with a young man who would later become momentarily infamous, during the season of Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, when he was found to have fabricated aspects of stories for a very high-profile national news outlet. I found all those episodes maddening: As a writer for small community newspapers, I was used to being blown off by sources, accustomed to politicians and other worthies refusing to return my calls. But if you’re a writer for the Washington Post or The New Yorker, people pick up the phone when you ring.

There’s no excuse for the small fry, and there’s really, really no excuse for bigfoot reporters from the majors.

Call me a snob, but I have always been mystified when fabrications show up in the pages of prestigious publications such as the New York Times or The New Republic. I recently taught a seminar at Hillsdale, partly on the subject of Rolling Stone’s shameful, fictitious account of a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia, a crime that did not in reality happen. How does this sort of thing make it into print, not in some backwater weekly but in a magazine with real editorial resources? We all make errors, and sometimes we make embarrassing errors, and the potential for making embarrassing errors increases the higher up the journalistic food chain one goes, simply because nobody is paying much attention to youngsters writing business features for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely got badly snookered by a source. That happens. I once got badly snookered by a source and published a caustic editorial criticizing the University of Texas for doing something that it hadn’t actually done. That was when I was in college, and that is, to some extent, what college newspapers are for.