RUTHFULLY YOURS

“It is only natural that the competing camps should offer these divergent views. The case, however, is not an “either … or” situation. It is perfectly reasonable to believe both that Menendez may be guilty of corruption offenses and that his political opposition on Iran is factoring into the administration’s decision to charge him. Put another way, if Menendez were running interference for Obama on the Iran deal, rather than trying to scupper it, I believe he would not be charged.”

The speculation that Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is about to be indicted on corruption charges is well informed enough that Menendez found it necessary on Friday to launch a preemptive self-defense in the media.

Sen. Menendez is suspected of influence peddling on behalf of Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist and major donor Menendez describes as a longtime family friend. In 2012 alone, when Menendez was seeking reelection to the Senate, Melgen contributed $700,000 to his and other Democratic campaigns.

In addition, the Washington Post reports, sources claim Melgen has done Menendez various other favors, not least providing prostitutes (including minors) while Menendez stayed at a friend’s Dominican resort home, an allegation the senator vigorously denies. Beyond that salacious aspect of the case, the FBI is investigating whether money and other favors from Melgen induced Menendez to intervene on his behalf in at least two significant transactions: (a) pushing the the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency to favor a Melgen-backed company in the acquisition of screening equipment for Dominican Republic ports; and (b) pressuring then-Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other top officials to resolve a Medicare billing dispute to Melgen’s advantage.

Even some Democrats in Congress have come to the conclusion that after the brouhaha over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech before Congress, President Obama wants to radically downgrade the long American special relationship with democratic Jewish Israel — and perhaps has a dislike of the idea of Israel. Add up the administration’s initial disparagement on the matter of Israeli settlements, untoward administration remarks during the Gaza War, its assumptions that a future autonomous West Bank had a right to insist on becoming Judenfrei, its downplaying the Iranian nuclear threat, John Kerry’s various editorializing about Israeli supposed overreactions, the constant hectoring of Israel, and rumors of a slowdown in military aid to Israel during the Gaza war, and so on and so on.

These acts seem to fit into a prior landscape of the administration’s anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli supposed slips, gaffes, and smears.

There is a tendency in Washington to miss the forest for the trees; the result often being different from what was intended. An example was Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which, in the words of Thurgood Marshall, stated that the Constitution should be “colorblind.” Brown overturned Plessy v. Ferguson’s (1896) “separate but equal” doctrine. While that was the right decision, an unintended consequence was that Brown led to affirmative action. The “colorblind” nature of the law was considered by some as too constraining on minorities. Today some conservative African-Americans, like Jason Riley, Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, claim affirmative action has done more harm than good. Others see it as a new form of discrimination.

Changing mores have likewise affected attitudes toward the family. Cultural changes and laws now ensure that women have control over their own bodies and most states allow gays to marry. Both movements have merit, and I support them. But a consequence has been a decline in the nuclear family. There has been an increase in cohabitation, one-parent households and the number of children born out of wedlock. Data from the Census Bureau confirms those trends and shows that poverty is most common in single-parent families. Forty-five percent of children living with a single mother live below the poverty line, as do twenty-one percent of children living with a single father. In contrast, only thirteen percent of children living with both parents do so. Are correlation and causation the same? Empirical studies suggest that they are

Congress’s entire Benghazi investigation, we now know, was based on an incomplete record.

Hillary Clinton has made some disingenuous statements over her political career, but none remotely compare to the tweet she issued Wednesday night: “I want the public to see my email,” she said. This requires—how to say it—a willing suspension of disbelief.

Mrs. Clinton was referring to the gracious permission she had just bestowed upon the State Department to release her email correspondence as the nation’s former top diplomat. She’s only in a position to grant such favors because it turns out all of her correspondence as Secretary of State was conducted on private email, run out of a server she alone controlled. The Clinton camp has spent this week explaining that none of this was untoward, that no laws were broken, and that she’s being transparent.

But three quarters of a million soldiers lost their lives, and the nation nearly extinguished itself.

The shooting will have been over for a century and a half this spring, but the casualties keep mounting. As recently as a decade ago the best estimates of the soldiers killed in the Civil War put the number at 600,000; today’s scholarship has increased the toll to three quarters of a million. That was 2.4% of the American population when the war began. As James M. McPherson observes in his brisk and engrossing book, “The War That Forged a Nation,” if the same percentage of Americans were killed in a war today, “the number of war dead would be almost 7.5 million.”

But the appalling mortality rate is hardly the only reason the war lives on in our culture. Mr. McPherson sees the war as lying at the heart—and the midpoint—of the American past, a terrible clarification of the ideals on which the country had been established in 1776. “Founded on a charter that had declared all men created equal with an equal title to liberty,” the author writes, America had by the 1850s “become the largest slaveholding country in the world,” an irony that vexes us even today, so long after Appomattox.

The partisan default in cases of alleged political corruption is for everyone of the opposite party or philosophy to pile on. So it speaks volumes about the lost credibility of President Obama ’s Justice Department that last week’s leaks to the media that federal charges are being prepared against Democratic Senator Robert Menendez has produced skepticism across the ideological divide.

It’s impossible to judge the charges without a formal indictment, and Mr. Menendez is from New Jersey, which rivals Chicago as a laugh line about political corruption. The stories say Mr. Menendez will be charged with using his office to aid a friend and donor, Florida eye-doctor Salomon Melgen, with federal business. Mr. Menendez responded by saying, “I have always conducted myself appropriately and in accordance with the law.”

The skepticism results from the politicized nature of Eric Holder ’s Justice Department as well as previous abuses in its Public Integrity Section. Recall the indictment of the late Senator Ted Stevens in the middle of his re-election campaign in 2008. His conviction was set aside after a judge found the prosecution had withheld “significant” exculpatory evidence.

After the earthquake in 2010, the Clintons’ outsize influence in the small nation increased.

The Clinton Foundation lists the Brazilian construction firm OAS and the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) as donors that have given it between $1 million and $5 million. Those relationships are worth learning more about.

OAS has been in the news because it is caught up in a corruption scandal centered on Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras. In November Brazilian police arrested three top OAS executives for their alleged roles in a bribery scheme involving inflated contracts and kickbacks. OAS denies the allegations. Closer to home the 2013 OAS donation to the Clinton Foundation deserves attention because of the power that Bill Clinton has in Haiti, where OAS has been awarded IDB contracts.

President Obama has again extended a jaw-dropped reaction to news of yet another scandal in what has become a parade of scandals scaring his administration. This time the President is trying to convince the American public that he learned of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account during her time as Secretary of State through…wait for it…the news media. It’s curious how every time someone in his administration fails at spinning his or her way out of a career-ending scandal he just happens to find out about it through the news media, as if he were as innocuous as the average American citizen.

When asked by CBS News’ Bill Plante about when he learned about the unethical – and most likely illegal – use of a private email account, complete with home-based servers, for official government correspondence, Mr. Obama replied, “The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.” He continued, “the policy of my administration is to encourage transparency…and that’s why my emails, the BlackBerry that I carry around, all those records are available and archived.”

What is it that compels the hundreds of millions of Muslims who slavishly accept Koranic injunctions to so eagerly be willing to destroy and desecrate all ancient and priceless artifacts of non-Muslims.

We hear during every ghastly atrocity committed by Muslims the Islamic war cry – Allahu Akbar – which doesn’t mean “God is Great” as most folks think it does.

No, it is the Muslim triumphalist cry that, “Allah is Greater.” This is the Islamo-Nazis, “Allah uber alles” supremacist pronouncement to the world just as it was the German Nazis, “Deutschland uber alles.”

Happening now throughout those parts of the Middle East under ISIS occupation or influence, Muslim hordes in Syria are destroying archaeological treasures, including Byzantine mosaics and Greek and Roman statues. In Iraq, ISIS has destroyed several Jewish Biblical tombs such as those of Ezra and Jonah.

Hillary Clinton’s trouble with her email account is only a symptom of what ails the lady. Like Bubba, she suffers from terminal arrogance.

Hillary and Bubba — or should that be Bubba and Hillary? — think rules don’t apply to them. When he gets caught in a jam, which is often, he winks, smiles, crooks his crooked pointing finger, and asks one and all: “Whatcha gonna do with a good ol’ boy like me?”

That always worked. Hillary knows better than to try that anywhere but at home. When the heat is turned up under her, as when the telephone rang at 3 o’clock in the morning with news of catastrophe at Benghazi, she disappears.