RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’m coming out of a week-and-a-half of sub-par health, and playing catch-up on the last few days’ news. Much of it is just new trees in the same old forest: the remorseless retreat of American power in the world – ie, “Yemen Rebels Seize U.S. Embassy Vehicles As Diplomats Flee”.

But some of it is almost too cute. In Paris, the street artist Combo has been beaten up by four “young people” who objected to his “Co-Exist” poster:

Combo declined to discuss the identity of his assailants. “It would only add fuel to the fire,” he told the French newspaper…

During a residency in Bayreuth, he grew his beard and started wearing the traditional Muslim dress—not because he was increasingly attracted to a more fundamentalist version of Islam, but, again, to disrupt established codes. To his friends asking him whether he was “going to jihad” in Lebanon, he answered, “I’m going to ji-art.”

“First I thought I was French, but I quickly understood that I was Arab, then beur (French slang for second and third generation North African), now I’m told I’m Muslim,” Combo continued, talking of the French des-integration.

On Monday I wrote about a curious British reaction to the Charlie Hebdo massacre:

The other day Wiltshire Police went to a local newsagent and demanded that, in the interests of “community cohesion”, he hand over the names of every customer who bought a copy of Charlie Hebdo… This is Mother England in 2015: You can still read samizdat literature, but your name will be entered in a state database.

The Daily Mail’s Amanda Williams reports today that this was not a one-off idiosyncracy by some bozo coppers in one county, but came from the very top:

National Anti-Terror Unit Handed List Of Charlie Hebdo Stockists To Local Forces Who Then Went Round Demanding To Know Who Bought Copies

The man responsible for this decision is Sir Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, who holds the additional responsibility of “national police lead for preventing extremism”. A Chief Commissar for Preventing Extremism is a title that not so long ago one would have had to go to Eastern Europe or a banana republic to find. But it is now held by a British policeman. Nevertheless, Sir Peter would like us to know that he thinks, somewhere way down the chain of command, some of the lads may have gotten a little carried away:

Anti-terror units handed local police officers the names of British newsagents who stocked the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in the wake of the Paris attacks.

But the decision by some forces to then visit the outlets and quiz shopkeepers about who bought the publication was ‘overzealous and unnecessary’, Britain’s anti-terror police chief has said.

Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and national police lead for preventing extremism, said he was now urgently clarifying guidance to all UK forces.

Today’s funniest news item comes to us courtesy of the Washington Post. Here’s the headline:

As Scott Walker Mulls White House Bid, Questions Linger Over College Exit [1]

Not a side-splitter, I admit, but I did savor the humor. Listen:

MILWAUKEE — Scott Walker was gone. Dropped out. And in the spring of his senior year.
In 1990, that news stunned [stunned!] his friends at Marquette University [2]. Walker, the campus’s suit-wearing, Reagan-loving politico — who enjoyed the place so much that he had run for student body president — had left without graduating.

Gosh. I mean, you don’t say. This, you will have noticed, is the tone that newspapers reserve for Serious Revelations. The short sentences. Staccato. Ernest Hemingway meets Bob Woodward.

It’s the sort of prose that is wheeled out when an 18 ½ minute gap [3] is discovered in the president’s secret tapes of his Oval Office conversations. This is serious, possums, pay attention!

But what did WaPo have for us? That Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin and likely GOP presidential candidate, decided to leave college without graduating.

Wow. And they meant it to sting.

As damaging revelations go, this does not even rise to the non-story that Mitt Romney had transported a family pet on the roof of his car. (By the way, the pooch, as Ann Romney recalled [4], “loved it.”)

No, the news that Scott Walker concluded that he had better things to do than hang about the ivied halls of Marquette University is about on a par with the revelation that Harry S. Truman had no middle name or that he had been a tailor, not a swell.

My own feeling — and I suspect that it is a feeling that will be shared by many Americans (though perhaps not those in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Berkeley, California) — is that, given the corrupt nature of American academia, the less exposed a presidential candidate is to so-called higher education, the better.

Would you like to know why the Washington Post commissioned this flaccid hit job? All is revealed in this sentence:

Since 1993, [Scott Walker] has run 11 races for state legislature, county executive and governor — including a highly unusual recall election in 2012 — and he has won them all.

Yikes. The GOP just might run someone who is not an off-the-rack, ready-to-wear guaranteed loser like John McCain or Jeb Bush. Maybe, just maybe, they have wised up. Maybe they will run someone of demonstrated political savvy who is a genuine but non-scary conservative and is by all accounts a likable chap. What then?

The faint acrid scent you discern rising from this fetid little piece of partisan slobber is the smell of desperation. That, of course, is what makes it funny. Scott Walker left college and got a job. Stop the presses! Maybe the WaPo gumshoes or Hillary’s (or Jeb’s) “opposition research” will discover that he bullied some creep in second grade or that he drank a beer when he was 18. Jeesh.

And so it begins: in the pages of the Washington Post, this pathetic “hit piece” by David Fahrenthold on Scott Walker of Wisconsin — a “human interest” story that has only one purpose: to marginalize the governor and establish for the coastal Democrats that he is not one of “us,” just as the WaPo story about Romney and his dog did. The headline alone gives the game away: As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit.

We can’t have “questions lingering” about a man who might one day be president now, can we? So here we go with this thoroughly nasty piece of work that brings shame and disgrace on both its writer and the newspaper:

In 1990, that news stunned his friends at Marquette University. Walker, the campus’s suit-wearing, Reagan-loving politico — who enjoyed the place so much that he had run for student body president — had left without graduating.

Another Obama foreign policy success.

Islamic State insurgents took control on Thursday of large parts of the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, threatening an air base where U.S. Marines are training Iraqi troops, officials said.

Al-Baghdadi, about 85 km (50 miles) northwest of Ramadi in Anbar province, has been besieged for months by the radical Sunni Islamist militants who captured vast swathes of northern and western Iraq last year.

Militants attacked al-Baghdadi from two directions earlier in the day and then advanced on the town, intelligence sources and officials in the Jazeera and Badiya operations commands said.

The officials said another group of insurgents then attacked the heavily-guarded Ain al-Asad air base five km southwest of the town, but were unable to break into it.

About 320 U.S. Marines are training members of the Iraqi 7th Division at the base, which has been struck by mortar fire on at least one previous occasion since December.

A new study is causing shockwaves amongst the climate alarmism community.

According to Slate.com, we are about to enter the “The United States of Megadrought.” The article shows the following graphs of historical, current, and projected moisture balances in the Central Plains and Southwest regions (negative numbers indicate dry conditions, with the magnitude indicating the degree of dryness).Look closely at these plots. First off, both regions were generally drier in the past than over the last several decades. In addition, there appears to be no clear anthropogenic climate change signature in either of these datasets. All we appear to be seeing of late is variability well within the historical record.

Yet the climate modeling efforts suggest we are about to go off the megadrought cliff in the near future. Who knows? Predictions cannot be refuted until they fail to pass. But given the poor performance of climate models to date, we should be very skeptical of any climate modeling projections — and we certainly should not be basing any policy on the models.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) is the one who really lied about combat service. read http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/nyregion/18blumenthal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

“There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records. ”
The author was an NCO in the 2d Bn, 327th Airborne Infantry, 101st Airborne Division, Vietnam 65-66

The Huffington Post has run a hit piece on the military service claims of freshman Iowa Senator, Joni Ernst, claiming that she has repeatedly overstated her role as a combat veteran. That opinion emanates from an organization notable for a staff that generally avoids military service and specifically, combat zones, with the focused circumspection one would normally apply to travel to Ebola outbreak areas.

Andrew Reinbach, a so-called* journalist, and whose HuffPo bio shows him to be a financial writer, seems to have embarked on a sugar-coated witch hunt for Senator Ernst, offended (you just know how easy that is for liberals to be) by Ernst’s campaign claims that she is a combat veteran. Worse, he fumes is that Joni allowed her husband, a retired Ranger Sergeant Major, to claim twice that she led troops into combat when she led a deployment of her Iowa National Guard transportation company into the Iraq war zone. Reinbach quotes other veterans’ opinions to buttress his argument:

Iran, with its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen, has surrounded all the oil fields in the region and is currently busy encircling Jordan, Israel and Palestine.

Iran not only reaches now from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, but Iranian Shi’ites have been spreading out through Africa and South America.

By the time U.S. President Barack Obama leaves office, Iran will not only have nuclear breakout capability, but also the intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver its nuclear warheads to Europe and North America.

If Iran can finally drive the U.S. out of the Gulf by threatening U.S. assets, it will be free to pursue still further expansion.

If the deal signed with Iran is full of loopholes, it is Obama who will be blamed. Does Obama really want his legacy to be, “The President who was even a bigger fool than Neville Chamberlain”? He will not be seen as “Nixon in China.” He will be seen as the Eid al-Adha lamb.

Michael Oren is an American. He’s not an American citizen, of course. He surrendered that passport when he became Israel’s ambassador to Washington in 2009. His combat service in Lebanon in the 1980s took place in an IDF paratrooper’s uniform, not an American marine’s. Indeed, his Israeli credentials are pristine, including even that apotheosis of the Israeli experience, a child wounded in battle. His Hebrew is fluent, his Arabic scholarly. After 36 years in his adopted homeland, it’s hard to think of any sense in which he is not Israeli.

And yet.

Throughout his journey from a dyslexic, frustrated New Jersey teen with knuckles scarred in brawls with anti-Semitic bullies to an ambassador with a Princeton PhD and two New York Times bestsellers to his name, he has framed his remarkable life story in profoundly American terms.

Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, who since 2010 has won more elections as governor than any other Republican in America, has been making noises of late about running for president next year. Yesterday it became clear that the media regard him as a serious candidate, for a reporter asked him an unserious question. As the Associated Press reports (with, oddly, a Madison dateline): “Walker refused to say Wednesday whether he believes in the theory of evolution, dodging that question and several others about foreign policy after delivering a speech about global trade in London.”

The foreign-policy questions are serious ones, and he promised to get to them in due course: “ ‘I don’t think it’s polite to respond on policy in the United States when you’re in a foreign country,’ Walker said when asked about Islamic State. ‘That’s certainly something I’ll answer in the future.’ ”

But the evolution question—with which the AP story leads—is a silly one. To “believe in” a scientific theory is a contradiction in terms: A theory is not a doctrine to be accepted on faith, but a hypothesis to be tested empirically. That said, it’s fair to describe Walker’s answer at the press conference as a dodge: “I’m going to punt on that one,” he said. “That’s a question a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or the other. So I’m going to leave that up to you.”